A Strokie Tale

It was an amazellent concert. Ben and I had much more fun than the last time we saw them: THE STROKES.

After the show we were walking back to the Aquarium where we parked (crossing our fingers that the gate would be open and that Ben's car wouldn't be towed) when Ben suddenly said, "Wanna wait by the tour bus and see if we see anybody?", and of course I was like, "Heck yes lets DO this raquet!", so we turned the corner and went and stood with this group of groupies out in the back, by this little gate. The first Stroke we saw was Albert, he came out of a door, walked in our direction, waved at us, then went in another door. We knew that if we just waited it out we could see summore of them.

Some of the members of The Eagles of Death Metal came out at various times , but no more Strokes. Some dudes came up to the gate with this display that said "Autographed cds - $20", and we got pretty excited. Those dudes hoped in a little green car and drove away when no Strokes came out. So we continued to wait.

We saw a rockstar-looking man with long black hair who looked oddly familiar come out of a door with a case of Ozarka Natural Springtime Watertime bottle crisps water bottle crisps......uh....bottles of water, and a bunch of us were like "Waterrrr!!!!", and he let our group disperse the water amongst ourselves (Ben and I didn't get any). He came back out a little while later with a box of pizza! And we shouted, "Pizzaa!!!!!", and he gave the full UNTOUCHED box of pepperoni/onion pizza to our group. Ben and I weren't graced with a slice of our own, but I took the box and ate some cheese out of it, "Stroke Cheese," I dubbed it.

About half an hour after that, we had been standing there a little over an hour total..maybe....I don't really remember, but at about midnight we heard this big cheer from an invisible group of people down the street. We ran down there to find another little gate that was holding people back from the Strokes' bus, Nikolai was the cause of the disturbance, and Ben and I fought around the crowd to try and get our ticket stubs signed.

We did not get our ticket stubbs signed by Nikolai, but about five minutes later Albert came out, and this time I reached over the crowd and said, "Pizza box!", and that easily got his attention and prompted him to sign it. The simplicity of getting a random pizza box signed by a rocknroll superstar inspired me to go down the gate to where Nikolai had made his way and get him to sign it too. I went down and found him taking a picture with some fans and I held the box up and he was like, "Haha, no thanks--OH you want me to sign it?", and then he did. By this time Ben had gotten his ticket signed by Albert and I went back to wait for more Strokies to come out.

Maybe 15 or 20 minutes later Fab came out to a roaring crowd of fans, some of whom were still waiting to get Nickolai's and Albert's autographs. Fab went on the other side of the bus, out of site, much to the dismay of the people in my general area, but we quickly learned that he was making his way toward us from the other end of the line.

A little while after that, the two remaining Strokes, Nick and Julian, reluctantly came and began their signing journey down the gate of enthusiastic fans. Nick started almost in the middle of the line while Julian started over where we were, meanwhile Fab went over the gate with a marker and started screaming, "JULIANNN!!! JULIANNN!!!!", immitating his much delighted fans who were now surrounding him. After I narrowly got Julians sig' on the box, I went and got Fab's.
I didn't really feel like bothering Nick because he seemed a little cranky and sick of everyone, but I couldn't just stop with him being the only one left, so I held the box up for a while and he eventually got to it, completing the entire display of all five Strokes autographs on this generic, Verizon Wireless Theater pizza box.