So far, we’ve re-lived the events of ten years ago, when a younger me when to Germany. The story so far: a guy at the youth hostel looks like Ewan McGregor, I have seen the house Thomas Anders of Modern Talking grew up in, the house he lived in some time in the 1980s, bits of the town and won a dinner with Thomas Anders. Now we come to the most important bits: the fanclubparty itself …
Saturday, 6 January 2001: THE D DAY (the TA day, the MT day)
PART 1 – THE FANCLUBPARTYIt’s 10:35am, and I’m waiting for my new Russian room-mate Rita to get ready. She came to Koblenz at 2am, and slept at the Haubtbahnhof before she came to the youth hostel this morning. She’s also going to the party. She showed me photos of Thomas earlier, which was nice. :c)
Libby is gone, where to, I don’t even think she knows herself. We met two American brothers (man, they were cute!) at breakfast, and we had a chat. The younger one is in Germany to study German, and the other one studies Chinese in Beijing or Hong Kong (China somewhere anyway). Back in the room, I got Libby to listen to “In 100 Years” and “Sexy Sexy Lover (In Bed With Shaire Mix)”, and she liked it. “Who’s the girl singing? Oh… hang on… is that Thomas?” she asked *LOL* Libby is 20, Rita is 25, and I wish she would hurry! My gods, I wish she would hurry!!
OK, ich bin zurück… Rita was getting ready, and into the room walks two girls, Stefanie and Nadinè from Berlin. I thought “two girls… this town… this day… this time… hmmm…” and asked if they were there for the fanclubparty, and they were, so the four of us took a taxi (Welsch of course!) to EXTRA (pretty cheap, since we were 4 people sharing it).
Rita and Birsen outside EXTRA At EXTRA, there were people already, even if the time was just 11:15 or something. After a few minutes, a girl walks up to me and asks who I am… the girl turned out to be Birsen! :c) She had a clip book with her, so we looked at all the old pictures and articles waiting for the doors to open. We met and talked to other fans (I can’t remember what all their names were, but if I see them again, I will recognise them!).
At 13:00, Guido Karp opened a door (to the left) to let disabled people in first. He talked to the crowd as well, but it was in German so we didn’t understand much. It was something about the FC-CD and Napster (we found out about that later anyway). After that, he opened the door to the right, and everyone PUSHED to get in. After being squeezed in, we got EXTRA cards (free drinks) and ran, literally, to the place where the party would be.
There was a doorway, and they checked bags for recording equipment (they really should have checked people better *giving the “I know someone who”-look*). Just to the left of the doorway were some tables where you could buy stuff, and to the right, up some stairs, were the room where the party was held. When I got into that room, Birsen, Rita and the girl from Poland (I’m really really sorry, but I can’t remember your name, and you didn’t write it in my book :c( …) was ahead of me and had taken place already. They had reserved a spot for me on the mattresses on the floor, so I climbed over to them. Second row seats!!
We sat there, happily chatting away, and then a girl leans over me (she was sitting one place to the right of Birsen), and starts talking to me! I of course wondered who the hell she was, and she said she was Franzi – the other girl I was trying to reach by phone but couldn’t!
Then Guido came on stage and talked in German, so we asked him to please speak English too, so he translated for us. Thomas would come at 15:00. He (Guido) asked if I was from Sweden (ja, ich bin aus Schweden…), and announced I had won the dinner, but I knew that already. :c)
At 3pm, the crowd’s murmur went down a little, and Claudia came into the room. Everyone cheered and clapped their hands and took photos, and Frau Weidung waved a little shyly at the audience.
The beautiful Claudia! Denn kommt Thomas… Cheering turned into screaming! Everyone screamed, yelled and clapped hands and there were thousands of photoflashes! When he entered, I was so close to crying of happiness! He sang (mimed, to be brutally honest, none of the songs were performed live) a song, “Love To Love You”, and when the song was over, the audience’s noise almost lifted the EXTRA ceiling!
Thomas Anders ♥ Thomas said hello and started talking and we asked him too to please not forget non-German fans and speak English. He was funny, charming, and he was teasing the audience. Like the girl in front of us, he asked her what she got for Christmas this year, and she said “I got blahblah”, and he said “This year?” – “Yes.” – “Christmas hasn’t been this year!” and so on. I find teasing and shite like that very annoying, and I almost got very disappointed with him, but he did it with a smile, and meant no harm, so I forgave him immediately. It was so wonderful to see him in real life for the first time. He really was for real.
There was a guy who sang a song about MT in German, but I can’t remember if it was before or after Thomas had entered. It was a cool song, good beat, but the only thing I know is that it was about MT (because he sang “Modern Talking” in it). I wonder what he sang exactly.
This here guy. Anyone? Before or after this guy’s performance, was the “famous Q & A”. I was lucky enough to get to ask Thomas a question – what was his first impression of Dieter? I asked this question, because in “Die Legende lebt”, the interviewer asks Dieter about what he first thought when he saw Thomas (“man, he’s small!” *LOL*), and I thought that was funny, so I wanted to know if Thomas also had thought something just as funny about Dieter. After saying something that he first saw him on TV, but he didn’t (I don’t remember perfectly, because it was a very confusing answer), he said “he is not ugly”. *LOL* Then he said that it was a nice guy and all, but it was the first thought I wanted, and I got it, and it was indeed very funny.
My heart it feels like … dub dub! My memory is failing me (I had too much fun!), but a girl band, IT-Girls, who are produced by KA.G.B. (has nothing to do with the Soviet Intelligence Agency), performed three songs. Their first single is released in March, by the way. It was good music, catchy, but the crowd was dying to hear Thomas sing again… and he did! A special dance version of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” (this song is on the Fanclub CD). No, that was in the end. He sang “I Cry For You”, which is a really nice ballad that they wrote for POPSTARS.
When he asked the crowd if we knew about POPSTARS, everyone said “No!”, and he said “Do you know Big Brother?”, everyone gave up a loud “JAAAA!!!”, so he said “Then you know POPSTARS!”. After the song, he improvised a little and sang a line from the song again, and when he got quiet, everyone screamed, so he sang a little bit more, and the same cheering again. :c)
At the party was a deaf artist, Jürgen Klein, who gave Thomas and Claudia two sculptures as a wedding gift. An orange T for Thomas and a blue C for Claudia. He had also done some paintings, so one he gave to the fanclub, and another one was given to a lucky winner in the audience. They drew a card from the pile of people who had confirmed their presence at the party with a postcard. The winner was a girl, but I’m not sure if it was she who had a postcard consisting of a paper with the words “ICH KOMME” on one side. Thomas thought that was quite funny, anyway.
Did I mention the temperature in the room was quite high? Soooo warm! Then again, I had an extra t-shirt on, but I took it off, because I would’ve died otherwise. *phew!*
There was a raffle to which you could buy tickets, I got 11 tickets (just hit me that I spent 11 marks on little pieces of paper! Geesh…!), but didn’t win anything. Well, you can’t be lucky all the time! ;c) After the song “Mandy”, there was the photo session. The entire room lined up to get their picture taken with Thomas, so it was a huge line (after all, we were 537 people there…), and I didn’t join it then. I found Claudia, and had a guy taking a picture of me and her, and in return I took a picture of him and her. I talked to her a little, and I didn’t want to keep her too long, because other fans wanted to have a chat with her as well, so I asked if she would be at the dinner, she said yes, and I said I would talk with her later. She said “Oh, are you the one who won the contest?” …Jaa… So we’d see each other later.
I had done some fan-shopping before the party began, so now I lined up to get my membership card for 2001. Unfortunately, they were out of Fanclub-CDs, so they will mail it to me, and everyone else who didn’t get it. After that, I got another poster (so I had 5 DM free for the photo) which I dropped constantly, and finally I managed to get it in a right place. I joined the line for photographing, and it passed by the bar, so I got a cola standing in the line. It was so nice to get something to drink finally! In the line I found (or they found me?) Nadinè and Stefanie again so we talked a little.
When it was my turn, I put 5 DM in the bucket a woman was holding, sat (more liked “dropped”) down next to Thomas and said “Hi Thomas!”. He said hi too, and Guido took a Polaroid photo of us, Thomas signed it and I also got him to sign a map of Koblenz. I said “see you later” to him, and got another one of those surprised “oh, you won the contest?”-looks and Guido told me to wait by the merchandising tables later and they would pick me up.
After the photo, I waited for it to actually turn into a picture, and teamed up with Birsen and the Polish girl again. Rita was somewhere else, don’t know where. We watched each other’s polaroids and talked. Then, it was time for the two girls to go *boo hoo*, and I went with them to the membership-renewal table, gave them both big goodbye hugs, and then I sat down on a sofa that was there. I talked to a guy the best I could (a little English and a little German, but we understood each other), and he wished me good luck at the dinner. Earlier, I had also found Birgit Wobbe and said hello to her, which was a little funny: “Birgit?” – “Ja?” – “It’s me, Sofia… Weidungs Welt!…” – “Yes, of course!”. *LOL* She didn’t seem very talkative though. Oh well.
WELL! So far so good! Can it get better than this? I suppose so … when you have a dinner date with your favourite singer to look forward to! To be continued next Sunday. 🙂
