Last Week: Five Shows in PA
Mon., Aug. 1. 2005 12:42pm EDT
Thanks to everybody who came to see us at our concerts in Pennsylvania last week, including superfan Kelly Frantik and her sons, Jacob and Zak, who came to all five of them, and pitched in at the merchandise table a few times to boot!
That's right, we said five concerts, not four. As originally planned, we did play Harrisburg on Wednesday, West Newton on Friday, Monroeville on Saturday and Meadowlands on Sunday, but we added a second show at a different venue in Monroeville on Saturday. Here's how that happened:
As it turns out, the Churches of God General Conference was holding its youth convention for about 500 youth (from PA, OH, MI, IN and elsewhere) in Monroeville the same day we played our concert at Family Christian Stores. Not only was it on the same day in the same town, it was on the same road, just a few hundred yards away. The band scheduled to play couldn't make it, and they asked us to fill in at the last minute.
The ironic thing is that the planning committee had originally wanted ApologetiX to play the event but didn't think we'd be able to do it. It just so happened that a pastor coordinating the event has a mutual friend with us -- Word Records sales rep and ApologetiX alumnus drummer Keith Harrold -- and happened to tell him about the original band not being able to make it. Keith let us know, and it fit perfectly into our schedule. It was a total "God thing," as they say.
Furthermore, Wednesday's concert in Harrisburg was our first ever at a Radisson Hotel. The second concert in Monroeville three days later was also at a Radisson. The Harrisburg concert was for the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (CCCC), so both Radisson events were for national denominational conferences.
Although they couldn't make the Harrisburg show, superfans Beth Davis and the Falarski family (Tim, Julie, Timothy, and Hannah) attended all four weekend concerts, as did our old friend and occasional roadie Steve Hopkins, who did a sensational job helping out with the sound, the table, and the "radical idiots" part on "Choirboy" (at Sunday's show).
Micah Clausen and Beth's dad, Larry Davis, also came to three of the shows, and both were a big help. Honorable mention to Jenn Kipp, Nicki Peters, and Dayna Weinhold, who ran the merchandise table in Harrisburg; and the Davidson family (Ted, Ruth, Caitlyn and Cameron), who took care of things at the second Monroeville show with help from our old friend "Cleveland" Vicki Liniminskison.
Thanks also to Pastor Joshua and Marcia Christiansen from CCCC, Pastor Conrad and Lisa Duncan at House of Faith and Tony the sound guy, Chuck Pernst and his staff at Family Christian Stores, Pastor Kirk and Heather Chneemann from Churches of God, and Pastor Joe DiDonato at the Meadows Track Chapel.
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