nycmermaid | Aug. 10th, 2003

Well the Warped Tour was awesome, even if it could have been better. I'm really glad I went, the bands were awesome and it's just not summer till I've attended some sort of hot, sweaty festival. The annoying thing, though, was that out of the 30 bands there, the two I wanted to see most were of course on two different stages at the same time! Blargh. I got to watch the first 15 minutes of Dropkick Murphys, which were great, even if they churned up some old memories of my ex. You can't beat guitars and bagpipes. Then Emily, Roslyn and I headed over to see All-American Rejects, who aren't my favorite musically but are so damn FINE that it'd be a crime to not see them again live. As we were waiting for AAR to come on, I could hear Murphys playing Finnegan's Wake, which sounded great from where I was standing and made me sad that I couldn't stay for the whole set. The Murphys crowd was great; there's something so special about fans who love their band so much, they bring huge banners with them.

The second phooey of the day occurred after the AAR show, when we passed by the Alternative Press booth only to see a sign that AAR had been signing autographs at the booth at 2 pm (by then it was nearly 5). Knowing I missed the opportunity to get Nick Wheeler or Tyson Ritter to sign my rack made me feel quite dejected. After another beer and a trip to the DM booth (where I bought a tank top), we decided we were filthy and sunburned enough to call it a day. As we were walking out of the park, Emily spotted the other AAR guitarist (Mike Kennerty) walking back into the park and she chased him down for an autograph (she just gave him her ticket stub to sign. I woulda done much better!) I followed after her but he took off after signing her stub. Emily was of course over the moon after that. :-) I was bitter but hey, she deserved it, because she saw him first and I would totally have never noticed him.

This morning, it looked too rainy outside to go to the beach, and since