Claire has a great new party trick at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary… She takes around musical people who are in Wellington to perform, shows them a real-life Kiwi as part of her guided tour, then they get uber excited and give her front row tickets and backstage passes to their show .

Since I am always up for any free stuff (so far it has been contemporary dance and a choir and now opera), I am allowed to go along. So last night (to the great anger of my dad who just forked out $200 for tickets in the row behind us (hee hee), we went to see Paul Potts. If you don’t know Paul Potts, you obviously missed the YouTube excitement of about 9 months ago, so I will include it here:

We got these neat little VIP badges that gave us backstage access (we were ‘with’ the conductor who, I must say, had very pleasant conductory movements), which we constantly showed to my parents behind us to remind them that we were far more busy and important than them… Then when the fun and games were over we headed backstage.

Paul Potts in the flesh opened the door and we mucked up big time by saying “Hi, we’re here to see the conductor” then looked at each other and said “Umm, but you did very well too… Good work!”

Then we explored the cool little rooms overflowing with wine and food and chatted with the pianist and conductor while busy people rushed back and forth.

I must say, after that experience that the performance business is quite different to the web business (imagine having in your contract, you have to pay us, but also keep us in constant supply of chocolate). I also like how the star (which in my business would be the web designers) get fawned over and asked for autographs. That would be quite a lookup for the books too really.

We are now also wondering what the correlation is between performing people and weirdly obsessive bird watching people.

Claire is now planning in advance for who she would next like to show around the Sanctuary.