Painter Adventures: The Next American Idol?

Jessi called me around 5:20 pm Monday night saying that she was going to audition in St. Louis and she wanted to know if I would go with her. Apparantely, she has wanted to go for a while and didn't tell anyone. She decided that it was "now or never" and she committed. I have a deeper level of respect for her because she had the "balls" to pursue her dreams. So, after my cousin left, I realized that she was serious, and made arrangements to have him go elsewhere. We then spent a while packing and booking a place. We ate through a drive thru and were off to St. Louis.

American Idol requires that you have a wristband and ticket to get in so we drove straight to the Scottrade Center in the hopes that we would get them. We lucked out, if we had waited til morning they would have been out. We stayed at the Drury Inn next to the Union Station and we got about 1-2 hours of sleep. They called all the registrants to the building by 5 am. This is where we got to sit outside on concrete for nearly 3 hours- so NOT FUN! At 8 when they got us moving we were feeling really excited for what was to come. Turns out, NOT SO FUN was to come. We were seated in our designated area of the arena and told to do different chants for the tv camera. This went on for at least an hour. Then, we were told how the process worked. So, we watched them finally start to audition by 9:30 (felt like 5pm) and we realized after 2 hours that our section wouldn't be called for at least 5 hours. So, 13 hours after we were told to be there, Jessi finally got to sing for 30 sec. Even though she didn't make it through I thought she was pretty incredible for trying. We drove home and it was a pretty long drive back when we waded through construction zones on little sleep but we made it just fine. Let me tell you that this was one of the craziest spurt-of-the-moment trips I've ever made. One I'm sure I'm not likely to forget.

Jessi, 5am waiting in the line

We look alert for 5am

The sun is coming up!

Filming, "Welcome to St. Louis" for American Idol, Ryan SeaCrest was there but no judges

Jessi is looking on as Ryan Seacrest gets us "pumped"

The arena is transformed to a singing center for the producers (the judges for the day). There were approximately 10,000 auditioners total which means that about 9, 960 were ahead of us.