Ringing in the New Year (Again)

This is how my husband and I rang in the Year of the Dragon...

Fireworks onstage as Katy Perry sang "Firework"! It seems The Secret is working for me again. Got free tickets unexpectedly late that afternoon! (Thanks to my brother!) So instead of a dragon dance, we got peacocks and a kittycat.

Hope this is a sign of all the good things in store for me this year. Happy New Year (again), everyone!

Still on a Kylie High!

Just wanted to give a shoutout to the Candy girls, who let me watch Kylie with them and their friends, and who saved my husband's street cred and kept him from being possibly the only straight guy in...well, practically the entire coliseum.

In my fave Express gold sequined top. "O, nandito na pala si Kylie!" my friends joked. I kinda knew the show was gonna be filled with sparkle. I just wanted to match. Haha

Now, just to give you an idea of how spectacular VareKylie was (really, it was kind of Cirque-meets-Aphrodite!), here's part of the first number from her encore. Sorry, ran out of memory! I kept furioulsy deleting old pics from my cam just to make room for videos!

And lastly, just wanted to share the London version of one of my fave numbers of the night. Aaaah I would kill to be part of this number!!!

Can you tell I'm still savoring the Aphrodite experience?

Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow!

I don't know if anything I write could ever do justice to the spectacle that was Aphrodite! I am still on a Kylie high!

Allow me to share a video of one of my favorite performances of the night, the jazzy burlesque version of "Slow." This one was taken at her London show; the stage here wasn't quite as fantastic (no spinning, elevating platform where the back-up dancers are strapped) but it was still one of the most elaborate setups I've ever seen--giant screens, half-naked flying men, and sparkly, sparkly costumes!

OK, I got nosebleed seats again (that recent Shanghai trip kinda didn't leave much for another big expense), so I didn't have a closeup view, but I gotta tell ya--it was the most sulit P845 ever! Her set list:

1. "Aphrodite"
2. "The One"
3. "Wow"
4. "Illusion"
5. "I Believe in You"
6. "Cupid Boy"
7. "Spinning Around" (possibly my most favorite Kylie song evurrr)
8. "Get Outta My Way"
9. "What Do I Have to Do"
10. "Everything Is Beautiful"
    
11. "Slow"
12. "Confide in Me"
13. "Can't Get You Out of My Head"
14. "In My Arms"
15. "Looking for an Angel" (a beefy male back-up dancer dressed as an angel went soaring from the center of the stage)
16. "There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)"
17. "Love at First Sight"/"Can't Beat the Feeling"
18. "If You Don't Love Me" (this was when I realized that Kylie doesn't just have that elusive X-factor--she really does have vocal chops!)
19. "Better the Devil You Know"
20. "Better Than Today"
21. "Put Your Hands Up"
22. "Especially for You"--the first time she ever sang it on the tour, as requested by Manila! We were Jason Donovan (or Kermit the Frog).
23. "Locomotion" (but of course!)

Encore:

1. "On a Night Like This"
2. "All the Lovers" (which ended with an explosion of gold confetti)
   

To be completely honest, I didn't know some of the newer songs--my Kylie fandom was at its peak during her Fever days--but that didn't really take anything away from the experience. The show was just...sigh. She was just...sigh! I've said this before and I'll say it again: When I grow up, I want to be Kylie!

Friday Night Escapade: Janet Jackson's Number Ones World Tour

Ari Gold: Oh, I got tickets. Happy belated.
Johnny Drama: How are the seats ?
Ari: Nosebleed, just like you like 'em.

Yup, my husband, a couple of friends, and I were in the nosebleed section at Janet Jackson's Number Ones World Tour--but no need to feel sorry for us. The venue was pretty intimate so our seats--up in the balcony, somewhere in the back but near the center (we got our tickets late!)--were still pretty good.

Surveying the crowd, I wondered if I was now part of the, er, older set, and if high school and college kids now see me the way I see people who watch, oh, Fra Lippo Lippi (or Trini Lopez?). It was a decidedly older audience--definitely not the same people that'll be cheering for Taylor Swift in a couple of weeks!

SPOILER ALERT: Those who plan to watch the concert in other countries might want to stop reading now.

There was no opening act. Miss Janet got right into it, starting with an intro video I could barely understand. (She's kind of soft-spoken, and the crowd was screaming really loudly!) I gathered that she dedicated the song "Go Deep" to Manila, the first stop on her 35-country world tour.

The "Go Deep" video then started playing before Miss J burst into the theater through a side door! Here she is in outfit number one:

Photo from Map

In this skintight number, she did a bunch of her dance-y songs, including "Pleasure Principle" and, yes, "Feedback"!!! I went nuts! I was practically the only one jumping and dancing and singing along in our section.

In her next set, she wore a sparkly gown with a slit up-to-there...

Photo from Map

And performed some of her slow songs. She had the audience belt out the first verse of "Let's Wait a While," and she also sang a crowd favorite...

Super low quality--converted the video into a small file and this is what happened!

The way all the women in the audience were in raptures (you could tell from the giddy tone of the collective voices), this was one song many were really waiting for, and that a number of them were thinking back to the days when this song came out ("Suddenly the memories came back to me in my mind..."). It reminded me a lot of that scene in the movie Fired Up, where all the girls (and some of the boys) at cheer camp knew the entire Bring It On dialogue by heart!

After the senti set, she changed into a black outfit and started the third set with "Doesn't Really Matter," before going into lighter, feel-good dance classics like "Escapade" and "When I Think of You."

Photo from Map

She also performed "All for You," which brought back memories of me dancing to the song in college. Sigh.

Next set, another black outfit.

Here, she did her more hard-hitting songs, starting off with a "What About" interlude (another CADs dance number back in the day). Then there was the song that, I realized, had one of the videos that really made me want to get into dancing.

I remember trying to get the steps back in grade school, not an easy feat considering this was pre-YouTube (and pre-Internet, for that matter!). Even though my body probably won't be able to do the choreography anymore, I knew in my head which movements were coming during the dance break. During this set, she also sang "Scream," dueting with a recording of Michael's voice. I wondered what was going through her mind, hearing her late brother's voice.

For her finale, Janet came out in an all-white outfit and sang "Make Me" before ending with a very touching "Together Again"--as she sang and danced to the song, pictures of her and big brother Michael flashed onscreen.

Photo from Map

It was such a sweet, unexpected ending. This concert was pretty amazing--not only did it have a whole set list of songs that I could sing (and dance) along to, but it had so many layers: It was exciting, engaging, and surprisingly poignant. So worth the nosebleed seats!:D

First Concert, Second Kiss

OK, so the photo isn't that great. But there's a story behind it: Girl is fully resigned to the fact that she wouldn't be able to watch the Usher concert because she would be working that night. The very evening of the concert, girl finds that she can watch the concert after all! Girl is caught unprepared and camera-less. Girl watches concert with boy--the first one they see together after nearly 10 years of being a couple. Girl is sad that she doesn't have her trusty golden digicam. Boy whips out camera-phone and snaps away.

Lesson learned: Be prepared--whether this means looking presentable, having your digicam, or being game for anything--because you never know when something special is going to happen!

OMG

That's the title of a song sung by this guy, at a concert that my husband and I went to last night...

That luminous guy in white, as viewed from our "VIP tent" as Hamil jokingly called it, is none other than Usher! As in "You Make Me Wanna," "Burn," "Confessions," "My Boo," "Trading Places" Usher! In college I danced to a medley of his songs! And at the concert, I realized that my calling in life is to be his back-up dancer! Haha.

In our nearly ten years as a couple, Hamil and I had never gone to a concert together. The last concert I attended was probably...Bon Jovi's, something I'm less embarrassed to admit now, given that they were the top-selling act in the US last year or something. Circumstances always kept us from watching the acts that kept coming over (sigh, even JT and Timbaland). This time, we didn't think we could watch because I had to work the night of the concert. And Hamil told his friends that it would be pointless for him to go since he wouldn't have anyone to dance with. (Sweet.) But things at work went swimmingly, and before 8:00 PM, it became possible for us to make it to the concert! I also figured that I needed to reward myself after a particularly grueling week.

Originally, we were willing to settle for the cheapest tickets (Bronze), but Hamil was able to pull some strings and we ended up with...

Since we were completely unprepared for this, I didn't have my camera with me. Hence, phone pics!

Woohoo! It was much more than I expected! And given that we (er, he) didn't have to pay full price (far from it, in fact), we were incredibly lucky!

We missed the first couple of songs, but it was still pretty awesome because...

...Usher sounds exactly the same live as he does on the radio--and no, it didn't seem like there was any lip-synching or auto-tuning involved!
...I loved seeing their dance moves. It just made me miss dancing so much. It's been over a year since I was last on stage!
...we had a pretty good view for something totally unplanned.
...he sang some of his old hits, and not just stuff from his latest record. (Yes, "record." It's a clear indication of how long it has actually been since I went to a live concert.)

On the down side, he didn't perform one of our all-time faves ("Twork It Out") and people weren't dancing (what's up with that?). But, ah, mere trifles! We got to see Usher! Yay! What a rockin' end to a long, stressful week!