Weird Al

While we had a family reunion around lunch time, the real excitement of the day was in the evening. After learning that he was coming to Cedar Rapids to perform at the Paramount Theater, I won a pair of tickets to the Weird Al Yankovic concert from Z102.9, a local radio station. It had been quite some time since I had last seen him perform when he toured following the release of his Running With Scissors album in 1999. I had also seen a performance of the Bad Hair Day tour at the Paramount Theater. Having seen Weird Al in concert twice before, I knew that this would be a terrific concert. Mel had never seen him perform before. Neither of us was disappointed in the concert!

Like previous Weird Al concerts I had seen before, there were plenty of costume changes. Not only did he perform a lot of songs from he most recent album, Straight Outta Lynwood, but he also included plenty of songs from his previous albums. While he changed costumes, fake interviews between Weird Al and other musical celebrities were shown on the video screens. Some of them were the same as ones I had seen in his previous concerts, but others were new.

I wasn't the only one in the audience who had seen some of those clips before. Seated right in front of us in the theater was a somewhat heavyset man wearing a baseball cap and an autographed Weird Al Yankovic jersey. Not only did he mouth the words to all of the songs, but he was also mouthing along with the words in the video clips! Besides that, he attempted, with a high degree of success, to mimic all of the gestures Weird Al did in his performance and in the video clips. This guy was a bit distracting, but it didn't detract much from our enjoyment of the performance.

One thing I have to remember before I go to another concert though is to bring along a pair of earplugs. My ears are still ringing slightly from the excessively loud noise. I know, that makes me seem like an old man, but I would like to be able to hear future concerts.

I took along a digital camera and got a couple of photos that turned out somewhat. The first one shown below is of Weird Al wearing a SpongeBob SquarePants shirt and a tutu with boxers with hearts on them underneath. This was the end of his removing pieces of clothing during his performance of "You're Pitiful," his parody of Jame Blunt's "You're Beautiful."

The second photo was taken during the beginning of the encore in which he sang a song about how everyone has a cell phone. People were waving their cell phones in the air during the song. This preceded his performance of the song "Albuquerque," which ended the concert.

I am very much looking forward to when Weird Al Yankovic releases another album and goes on tour again. I'll be sure to be there. This concert was more than worth the thirty-dollar price that the tickets cost, even though we got ours for free!