Hannah Montana

Took my little nieces (8 and 11) to a taping of the Hannah Montana show last week.  Tickets are invite-only; a friend of mine who works in the Disney universe hooked us up, for which we are very grateful!  The littlest niece is wild about HM, like all 8-year-old girls.  The weird thing, from her perspective, is that it isn’t like a concert (she has all the HM concert DVDs), it isn’t simply a live performance of the TV show – it’s more like take-your-kid-to-work day.  There’s a crew of dozens of people, cameras, mics, cables, chairs, directors and all sorts of random grown-ups everywhere. They’re constantly buzzing around doing some boring thing other than filming TV.  For a few moments, the cast comes out and acts briefly, usually messing up somehow and doing it over and over (keep in mind, this was late on Friday, at the end of a long week of filming, towards the end of a long season of filming every week.  We’ve all been there.  Except the cast are only 15 years old.  Some life…).  Then the cast vanishes and the crew buzzes around again for a long time.  There’s a warm-up guy, sort of a hyper-caffeinated comedian, who keeps the kids from falling asleep with games, HM trivia, literally passing out bags of candy.  Without him it might have been total misery for the girls (started standing in line at 3pm, got in around 4:45, started filming at around 6, finished around 9pm).

Despite the relatively limited view from the audience bleachers, the long hours, the constant interruption of alarm bells and having to be quiet, lights on and off, having to fake laughter on the eighth take of the same unfunny line….  Every time someone in the cast appeared, an electric jolt ran through the crowd of mostly pre-teen girls, and at the end, the girls got to pose for a couple seconds in front of Miley Cyrus and the others.  I think that’s the part they’ll remember.

A few more photos from the show here. Catching up on some other stuff…  some new photos here and here, and lots of reorganization on the front page of andyradin.com. Check it out.