Hooked News

—February 18 2010—
HOOKED: Rock Star Moment!

This is the story of Hookslide's gig tonight, and George's Rock Star Moment.

We were booked this evening to sing the national anthem for the Stanford Women's Basketball team as they took on the University of Oregon Ducks. We were going to meet up around 4:30 at Stanford, do the sound check, rehearse for a couple of hours, and then go on a bit before game time, 7:00. George, it turns out, had another engagement (a cooking class, if I'm not mistaken) at 7:00, so he was going to have to bolt right after singing. Also, to add intrigue to the situation, this evening of basketball was to be hosted by the Stanford Cancer Center, and we were to wear pink t-shirts indicating as much.

This morning, as I got to work, I got a phone call from George: "I'm still in Chicago, I wasn't on the flight I thought I was on, and worked really hard to get this other flight that puts me at San Francisco International at 5:45. I might make it, but you guys might want to have a backup plan."

So I assured him that everything would be OK, and through the course of the day, Jon, Bud and I planned to meet at 4:30 as planned, and Jon would sing some hybrid of George's and his own parts. Jon's used to doing two parts at once, right? Why should the national anthem be any different?

We arrived around 4:45, and ran through the anthem a few times, with Jon's new "part" evolving with each iteration. After about five run-throughs, we were pretty happy with it. We learned that we were going on at 6:50, so we decided to swing by Starbucks and grab a snack and something to drink, as we speculated about George's chances of making it on time. "If he calls us from the long term parking shuttle by 5:50, then he's got a chance."

We heard from George at 6:02, from the long term parking shuttle. No chance.

So we ran our little 3-part version of the national anthem a couple of times more, and donned our pink t-shirts. At 6:40, Jon called George:

"Where you at?"
....
"Then you have a fighting chance. Come straight to the lot next to Maples. Park in the loading dock."

We asked Jon where George was: On Page Mill. The plot thickens.

Between 6:42 and 6:46, every time the door opened, all our heads whipped around to see if it was George. It wasn't. We had four microphones ready to go, but our coordinator took back one of them at this point, since clearly we weren't going to need it.

6:47 - Bud walks to the door, and makes a face that I misinterpret as, "Holy cow, he's here!" He was not there.

6:48 - Nothing happened at 6:48.

6:49 - Bud walks to the door, and makes a face that I misinterpret as, "Nothing happened at 6:49." In reality, with 45 seconds to go, George has arrived, jumped out of his car in the loading dock, caught the pink t-shirt tossed to him by Bud ("Put this on!"). With 30 seconds to go, he puts on the t-shirt over his shirt, grabs the extra microphone, and fixes his collar.

6:50 - We're announced. We saunter out casually and sing a very capable national anthem.

6:53 - We walk off the court. George pulls off the pink t-shirt, walks straight for the door, yells, "See you guys later!" and drives off to his cooking class.

Four minutes total. Four minutes of pure awesome. This, my friends, is one of the finest examples of what is commonly known as a Rock Star Moment.