Friday, November 5, 2010 was seriously the best day of my life! I won tickets to go to a taping of the Sectionals episode for Glee this season! I took my good friend Kellyn Brandt with me.
I took this picture to illustrate my excitement! And also because my hair is getting really long.
I went and got Kellyn at noon because I wanted to make sure to get there early and scope everything out. The tickets said they were first come first serve and I didn’t want to take any chances at not getting in. We got to the theater a little after 1:00. No one was lined up yet, but there were cops everywhere. We went to eat at CPK and I got the avocado rolls because I haven’t had them in so long. SO good! We went to a soda shop after called Galcos. It’s a store with old fashioned sodas with really hilarious names. I took a lot of pictures. Then we headed back to the theater. It was about 3:30 at this point. The line was already really long, but not too bad. We waited there for 3 hours. Fans of Glee are super annoying! Kellyn and I were going a little nuts. But we had plenty of entertainment. There was a guy who looked like Billy Ray Cyrus. He had the hair, the super country shirt, and the chick sunglasses. Seriously, his hair didn’t budge an inch when he moved. I wish I’d had my camera, but we left everything in the car because they wouldn’t let us take any recording devices in. And I didn’t think we’d be there for more than like a half hour or so. I think I knew better than that, but I left my camera in the car anyway. People who worked with Glee kept coming out sporadically to give us photo release statements to sign and tell us to put our phones in our cars. One of them was really handsome. He looked just like Clinton from What Not To Wear. It was uncanny. He ended up being a big head honcho once we got inside. They finally gave us wrist bands at like 6:00 and they took us in at 6:30. It was definitely annoying to wait that long, but it was SO worth it once we got inside.
The set was interesting where the audience was sitting. There was a floor section and two balcony sections that were at a really steep incline. Kellyn and I were in the upper balcony section on the first row. We missed being in the lower section by like 6 people, which was a little frustrating because the lower section would for sure be on camera. The floor section was filled with dummies, the actor’s parents, and some paid extras. We sat inside for probably another hour before people started coming out on stage. But the Clinton guy said since we waited so long he was going to try to get the actors to come up and do Q&As with us. He said he couldn’t promise anything, but a short while later he brought Chris Colfer (Kurt) up with him! He was literally two feet in front of us as he walked by. That was my first heart attack of the night. SO cute! He is really witty and just completely adorable. Someone asked him why he was so adorable and he said some of it was genetics and he was created in a lab. Another girl asked him if he was single - implying that she wanted to be his girlfriend. I wanted to tell her that he likes boys in real life. He was wearing a Chunk shirt! 
The exact one that my sister Amanda has. I thought that was funny. We tried to get him to do the Truffle Shuffle, but he declined.
We were given prop programs, but they were pretty legit and had a lot of information about Sectionals in them. They started filming with one of the other groups. The group was called The Hipsters and they were seniors, as in senior citizens. Seriously, one of the cutest things ever. They sang a song I’ve never heard of called In the Living Years. They filmed the group from behind to get shots of the audience. After they performed, The Warblers performed. They’re the group from the school that Kurt’s new boyfriend is the lead singer of. They sang Hey, Soul Sister, a song that I loathe. But now I have a positive memory of it, so I don’t loathe it quite so much anymore. They rocked it. It was very entertaining and they were wearing the sexiest prep school blazers. I dig men in uniform.
After the first two groups performed, all of the Glee cast members slowly started coming out on the stage and everyone in the audience was obviously screaming. They really weren’t that far away from us. I could see them all perfectly. Cory Monteith (Finn) popped out really quick up on the balcony and said, “Hi!” That was my second heart attack of the night! That’s all he said because he had to go down to film, but he was like 10 feet away from us!
New Directions performed Time Of My Life and a song called Valerie. They were both awesome. The dancing was a lot more involved than they’ve done in the past. Especially in Valerie. Heather Morris (Brittany) and Harry Shum, Jr. (Mike Chang) did a sick swing dance number with all these awesome lifts, or “fireworks” as it was described to us.
There was a lot of downtime between takes and it was so funny to sit and watch the cast interact. Kevin McHale (Artie) and Naya Rivera (Santana) were meowing at each other and Kevin does this game where he plays an animal and the rest of the cast gives him commands like he were a dog or something. He was a big flirt. Kevin would stand up a lot in between takes and the other cast members would play in his wheelchair. When he and Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina) came up for their Q&A it was really funny to see him just walk up. Mark Salling (Puck. That’s right, Puck is back! And so is his Mohawk!) took a video of Harry Shum, Jr. doing a Dirty Dancing impression of Patrick Swayze and posted it on Twitter. I laughed so hard and you can totally hear me in the video.
http://www.twitvid.com/SPVJG
Cory Monteith was staring at me from the stage the whole time. One of the perks of having red hair, I guess: you stand out in a crowd. He and Lea Michele (Rachel) came up together toward the end of the night and when they were called back down they said they’d let them come right back up. People had been trickling out throughout the night and after Lea and Cory went down to film after their Q&A, Kellyn and I moved down to the lower balcony and were in the 3rd row from the front, right in the middle section. That’s when they did most of the filming of the audience, so we’re totally going to be on the show if they show the balcony section at all! They sent us home right after that.
Half of the actors came up for Q&As at one point or another except for Amber Reilly (Mercedes), Heather Morris, Matthew Morrison (Mr. Shue), Harry Shum, Jr., Naya Rivera, and Mark Salling. Harry and Mark came up and signed some autograph’s, though, so all the cast except for three people came up to at least say hi. Naya and Heather may have been in that group, too, but I can’t remember. And they were all just feet away from me! Dianna Agron (Quinn) was so sweet. She is completely the opposite of her character in real life. And Chord Overstreet (Sam) seems like he’s in love with her in real life as well as on the show. The cast members who didn’t come up all waved to us from the stage and most of them said something to us. Matthew Morrison told us we were sexy.
We got to be there for four hours. Best four hours of my life! There were so many things going on around me that made me want to pee my pants the whole time! The whole day I just kept saying, “This is real!” I accomplished one of my main goals of moving to California and I was on Glee! It was so amazing! It wasn’t what I had originally anticipated when I moved out here to try to get on the show, but I’m completely satisfied with the opportunity I got. It was seriously the BEST DAY EVER!!!!
