Groupie!

Sometimes you just gotta know who to talk to! Or just have cool friends with super cool connections. I scored a VIP pass to the show Extreme Makeovers Home Edition. Yeah that's right you heard me, home of a Mr. Ty Pennington! He let me take this here photo while he took a break from shooting. Reluctantly I took the photo of his shirtless self, holding a power tool. Many of you who know when I went will recall that the house was done when I got there so you'll probably out me in my big fat lie, so yeah I didn't take this photo, but it is fun to look at don't you think. Kelly and I went to Sunrise, KY with out VIP pass's excited about all that we had to look forward to. A white tent full of design team talent, shrimp cocktale, time to converse with the design team about deep topics, just to get the oppurtunity to rub elbows with someone famous, was all we wanted. Yeah that was a crazy picture. After a crazy trip on some backwoods crazy roads in Kentucky, we get to our destination, Claysville Church, where we were suppose to catch a shuttle to take up to the house. We pass through one security check, on to another. Security check #2 was a security guard who has a surprising resemblence and deminor to Flavor Flav, seriously he talked just like him not quite as wacked, but loud and crazy. So Flavor Flav told us they weren't running anymore shuttles for VIP's, and we'd have to come back tomorrow........DO WHAT?.....Kelly told lie number 1 right about now, "uh....we drove all the way from Dayton, Oh, and we can't go up?" DAYTON, OH??? LOL.....Dayton is only like 20 minutes farther than Cincinnati, why use Dayton as a lie, Cleveland would have been more pitiful! He insisted that we had to go. So hanging our heads he headed back the scary blair witch project roads back to the big city. But then we remember passing the road that led to the house it was blocked off. I suggested lets play dumb, flash the VIP's and see what it gets us. We encountered yet another not too bright security dude, who said...."uhhhh....last I heard about that you had to go up to the church and catch a shuttle......" Damn-it! I was like "what we can't just drive up there? He's like "uhhhh...NO...", so we headed up the road.....then I was like wait a minute we can't give up that easy. I said to Kelly what if we came into the church the backway.....(a gravel road we exited on) which had no security. Park our car, slide into the long line that already existed....he'll never know. Kelly had a scarf, I had a knit hat I could put on, we'll have disguises.....LOL....it's a plan. Pass up the church right pass all security check points, slide in the back way, parked our car walked up to the VIP tent and stood in front of it like we belonged avoiding eye contact with Flavor Flav. Stood next to some lovely ladies, who were wearing the famous blue shirts. They said we're volunteers. Kelly's like how did you get to volunteer? They were like we just went into the tent and said we want to volunteer. We were like OK! Walked in said nothing about the VIP at first, just said "we're Volunteers", the girl was like "oh are y'all caterers?".....we both went....."Yep!", she handed us a blue shirt, press releases to sign, we then mention the VIP, she said oh well you can't be both so I'll give you your badges just don't wear them on the outside of the blue shirt. SCORE! Crap I hope they don't expect the caterer's to have food. LOL.....we got right on the shuttle....went right up to the house got dropped off. Went in the volunteer tent to get our assignment. Right away we were instructed to take 40 meals to the house from the Olive Garden Tent to feed the workers who were AT THE HOUSE, who hadn't eaten in 15 hours. We got escorted to the Olive Garden Tent and handed off to someone else. Once we got on the road to the house area, we were completely free to roam the worksite no questions asked. Holy crap. We did get the food and take it directly to the FRONT PORCH OF THE HOUSE. To which Ty was right behind the door. After we delivered the food, we hung out on the walkway in the front yard watching Ty shoot some scenes inside the house. Everyone was standing around waiting to MOVE IN FURNITURE. Are you kidding me? But once the Pottery Barn truck rolled up, the production assistant said Maggie had hand picked volunteers for moving in the furniture. Oh well, but we hung out and watched them lay the sod, was asked if we'd like to help...but we didn't want to get dirty. If we weren't responsible adults with jobs and true groupies we could have hung out all night into the morning for the reveal. But at 10:30 pm, we decided we'd had a good enough experience, heck we scored a T-shirt.....we better get back. We got to see Preston, Paige, and Ed (the english dude, I think it's Ed)...oh and Ty....hubba hubba...he had his megaphone. There were signs all over saying "no photographs", once I felt we had a sufficent experience I started taking pictures. I figured if we got kicked out we had a good experience. No one said anything. I was a little afraid to take photo's of Ty. It was so much fun being a groupie, we had a blast. Had we not encounted the right people we wouldn't have made it as far as we did we were totally lucky because security was pretty tight. We just happened to encounter a guy who was willing to work some magic for us. What fun being paparrazzi!