Each Hanson brother has an activity that they do with the fans. Our first activity was bracelet making with Zac. We got in line and when we were approaching the door we were told that the session was full so he would have to do a 2nd one for the rest of us. Staff seemed surprised it was full… let’s do some math. 400 fans there (roughly) and they are split in half with red and green passes… so 200. And we are trying to fit into a room that holds 100…
We ended up hanging around for an hour while session 1 did their thing because we weren’t sure if people would try to get into both sessions and if we were first in line we knew we’d make it in. Zac ended up coming by and asking if we were waiting for the second session and when we said yes, he said good because he would be a pro by then. We had red, green, yellow and black thread and were instructed to make a knotted bracelet. At first I couldn’t remember how I made them but once Zac said “make a 4” it all came back to me and I was off to the races. He came by the check on everyone and said that if you made 10 knots it would be “really big” and I told him “not that big, I have 10 already” and he seemed annoyed I knew what I was doing! lol He also mentioned that they did bracelets because most of us made them when we were 12 and that is when a lot of us found Hanson. I remember selling them for money so I could buy Teen Beat and Tiger Beat magazines!
Our second activity was the following day with Taylor. It was tie dye. I had done tie dye at the 2 other BTTI events with Zac and that went well, but this year it was a mess. Literally and figuratively. The shirts looked good when we first opened them, but all the dye started to drop down to the bottom of the shirts and looking at the initial photo when I first opened the shirt to what I am wearing now that it is done it looks like a totally different shirt. The shirts we were given were also not 100% cotton, which is what is recommended so that might have been the problem. Note to self – when Michaels has a sale during the year, stock up on a few just in case it is an activity again in the future! My bag for the trip got tie dyed, the strap on my brace did too.. and of course, my hands. They provided only 1 glove per person and it was so hot that I just gave up.
The final activity was trivia with Isaac, which once again I found to be hard – but moreso because I don’t have their song lyrics memorized well enough than the fact that the questions were hard. (There was one tour related question that I found to be super easy!) I have the first two albums lyrics down to the point I can recite them at the drop of a hat. Anything beyond that came out when I was in college and had less and less free time to listen to their CDs over and over. And while I probably could sing along to most of the songs if they played them live (that’s actually probably a lie too though since they did a few in the concerts I couldn’t really sing along to aside from the chorus), giving me a snippit of a lyric didn’t trigger anything in my brain. So, note to self, if they do trivia again next year, spend a couple weeks before listening to all the Members Only EPs to get familiar with the lyrics! The sad thing is, I re-did the lyrics section of hansonstage not too long ago too, but that was no help. And while I had WiFi I felt that even using my own website to cheat was still cheating so I didn’t look anything up.
Overall I liked these activities more than last years, though I did kind of miss painting. (Kind of) But not the anxiety that came with trying to figure out how to bring home a ceramic piece of art.