The Weird Al show

My God, that was an incredible show.

Al Yankovic is 65 years old. It was literally 90 degrees in the shade in Indianapolis yesterday evening. I have no idea how anyone on stage even survived the experience in the first place, and they put on a two-hour-plus show featuring at least a dozen costume changes (everyone in the band, not just Al himself) and startlingly impressive dancing. If my foot ever ends up above my head, it is not going to be on purpose, and it is likely that I have either just died or am about to. Al did a high-kick like five or six times during the show. And when I talk about costume changes, I don’t mean, like, wearing a different shirt. I mean getting into a full-blown fat suit complete with facial prosthetics in three minutes and then doing an entire song in that getup, or doing the last fifteen minutes of the show in Jedi robes.

The man’s voice is still on point, too. The set list was ridiculous; some of the songs were done medley-style where he’d do a verse or two and then move on, but he’s been doing albums since the early eighties and while there probably wasn’t literally a track or two from every single album, the show absolutely spanned his entire career. I discovered that there are Weird Al songs that I probably haven’t heard in thirty years that I still have memorized. I was singing along with songs and mentally trying to jump ahead to the chorus to figure out what the hell I was singing.

The polka was new, and there were at least a couple of songs that were unreleased. He covered the costume changes with video vignettes featuring every single time anyone on a TV show has ever mentioned him, random little clips of weirdness, and a bunch of junket-style interviews with celebrities where I’m pretty sure some were him being inserted into other interviews, some were him interviewing people who had no idea who he was, and some were piss-takes where everybody was in on the joke.

(I’m going through my MP3s right now. Nothing was played from Poodle Hat. No, that’s wrong, he did Ebay. Still looking.)

(Okay, I’m pretty sure the only album he didn’t do a song from was 1993’s Alapalooza. That’s it.)

Anyway, yeah. Best birthday ever, y’all.

A bit of doggerel

I’m kinda proud of this bit of nonsense, so I’m preserving it here since it’s less ephemeral than Twitter: