The Scope

A Twitter Story

I’m a little bit in love with Twitter. I’ve always liked it for posting bad jokes and location updates (In France, dans une toilette!) but this weekend it got a little cooler.

You can search for any keyword and see real-time updates as people tweet about your search term. So this week I’ve kept searches open for various Junos keywords and I started to follow some of the nominated artists.

One of these artists was Bobs and Lolo, a children’s duo from BC. When they saw they had a new follower from Newfoundland, what followed was a brief conversation about their trip here for the Junos. I recommended The Sprout to them because one of them is a vegetarian.

Skip ahead to last night at the Juno Welcome Reception at The Rooms. All four floors were filled with people sipping cocktails and eating from the circulating hors d’oeuvre plates. The conversation was of still-stranded collegues, unable to get in because of the weather. Then Major O’Keefe made a speech, joking that the fog was intentional to give everyone a taste of what we deal with, but it was now ordered away. (Admit it, we’re all secretly a little proud of the bad weather this week.)

Mayor (bottom-right), Mayor's projection (top-left)

Anyway, it was in the shoulder-tight crowd of hundreds of people that I recognized two of them — Bobs and Lolo. I introduced myself as “that guy from Twitter” and we chatted about the awards and how they were enjoying Newfoundland. They told me how they met in Girl Guides and how their music started as classroom instruction, and it turned into a music career entertaining children. Then they introduced me to a few of their friends, including Carmen and Camille, nominees for Dance Recording of the Year.

Bobs and Lolo (Robyn and Lorraine)

I should say there were a pleasure to meet, and had it not been for Twitter, I would’ve spent the evening only chatting with people who swore they knew me from somewhere. (Hint: they did not.)

The Juno Cup

After the reception, I headed to the Juno Cup, where The Rockers (musicians and Jake Doyle, presumably there on some sort of P.I. mission) faced-off against the NHL Greats. I’m no hockey expert, but I believe the NHL team won because Rex Goudie let the small back thing (or ‘puck’) into the netted area one more time than the other similarly-dressed guy who was standing in front of the other netted area.

Rex Goudie smelling his glove

Also, Jim Cuddy from Blue Rodeo was there and people seemed very excited about that. And some of the musicians seemed to have trouble not dropping their sticks, further diminishing their ability to move the tiny black thing around.

Again, I’m no expert.

The Set

Earlier that day, I headed to Mile One where the organizers gave us a glimpse of the set. They spoke about the construction and the design concepts and about riding on the excitement and patriotism stirred up at the Olympics. There will even be some Olympic presenters.

The short reveal of the set was intense. The theme is icebergs. A giant upside-down iceberg hangs down in the middle of the stadium. It’s made of reflective surfaces like a disco ball and is intended to reflect the audience when someone is presenting in front of it.

The Disco-berg

Then they pulled up the screen and disco-burg that was between us and the performance stage and behind was a stage covered in mutli-colored oddly-shaped walls. It assaulted my eyes with vibrant colour. And then, somehow, there was no long color, but a stage made of icebergs. Magic.

Answering questions in front of the stage

As they later explained, the stage has a number of structures surrounding it. Made from canvas on a wire frame, the designs on these structures are created with projections. Each of the many surfaces has a different image projected on it which, when all together, turn them into icebergs and volcanos or retina-burning colour explosions.

It’s gonna be some show.