Helen’s DaveCon 2006 Trip Report
II. Showtime!
Dave ran offstage for his grand entrance, and I was startled by the cold open playing on the monitors. I’ve never seen a cold open “live” (it’s pre-taped, of course) before. Normally when Dave runs off after the warm-up, the band is already playing the theme and Alan goes right into the announce. I’m enjoying the cold opens they’ve been doing lately, BTW. More, please.
Well, you’ve seen the show, so I won’t say too terribly much about it. The highlights for me:
- Mike McIntee’s bit as an audience member who doesn’t want to play KYCE. Nice acting job, Mike, and I think we did a good job as audience ambassadors, laughing our heads off at Mike’s nonchalant, “Eh, no thanks.” (You can hear Bill Lehecka’s distinctive, whooping laughter during this.)
- The silliness with Sue Hum and the pudding.
- The paperboy riding across stage and delivering Dave’s paper.
- The stoner Hacky-sak dude. (The guy came out and just stood there looking spacy for quite a while before saying anything.)
Other observations:
- We got a different Act 5 than what you saw at home. What we saw was the stoner dude sitting next to Mike in the audience. I try to keep my eyes off the monitors when I’m in the theater (watch what’s going on all around you!), so I didn’t see exactly what happened there, but it might have been the stoner dude offering Mike a joint. What actually aired as the Act 5 was a shot of Alan Kalter swigging Listerine.
- Oh, and speaking of the monitors, they have new flat panel monitors, which have a different aspect ratio than the old ones. Presumably this is due to the changeover to hi-def.
- Sandra Bullock was okay, I guess. Too bad we missed Bonnie Hunt and Amy Sedaris by a few days in each direction, but it doesn’t really matter who the guests are. We’re there to see Dave.
- There was a very short break between Sandra Bullock’s two segments, far shorter than the length of commercials you get at home. Eddie Brill told us during the warm-up last year that they had shortened up the breaks to keep the energy level up. There was a longer break while they set up for the musical guest.
- If I’d been watching at home, I’d have fast-forwarded through Widespread Panic, as I do with 95% of all the musical guests. (In fact, that’s what I *did* do when I watched the show on the DVR when I got home.) In the theater, I took the opportunity to watch what Dave was up to. At other tapings, during the musical guest I’ve seen Dave sit quietly at his desk. This time he got up and walked around, talked to Bill Scheft, talked to Barbara Gaines over at the podium, and eventually just stood behind the desk. Widespread Panic was incredibly loud, BTW. I could feel the bass pounding through my chest.
- Something else you didn’t see at home: After Widespread Panic finished their song and left the stage, everything stopped and so they could re-do Dave’s introduction of Widespread Panic. Dave said he had screwed it up the first time. We thought they were redoing it because of the obnoxious guy behind us (not one of us) who had yelled out when Dave introduced them, but it may have been because Dave held up the album backwards on the first try; perhaps it was for both reasons. The obnoxious jerk yelled out again during the do-over. Dave stopped and said “It happened again” and did the intro a third time. The guy yelled out *again*, but they took that take, and I couldn’t hear him when I watched the show at home.
- The show seems to go by very quickly in theater. It was over before we knew it.