Charlie Liu’s Blog

When we arrived at the Ellen DeGeneres show, Ellen greeted us outside the building. Well, Ellen Rocamora, that is! Ellen DeGeneres of course would be too busy to do that! Ellen was helping producer Vikki to get Charlie to his dressing room and get comfortable.

Charlie was dressed in the same outfit that he wore when he won the Mass state competition (BTW, MMTA finally updated their website and here is Charlie’s photo and the mp3s of his winning repertoire). Both Ellen and Vikki were super nice and complimented Charlie on his outfit. They were very helpful in getting Charlie comfortable. They talked with Charlie a lot and kept telling us how cute Charlie was. Charlie was a bit nervous as he first arrived at the show, as I can tell, even though he’s not a person that shows much excitement. But the juice and snacks in his dressing room obviously possessed some calming power as well.

Soon came a brief rehearsal when we discovered that the airline baggage handler successfully broke one side of the sturdy pedal extension that Charlie used a couple years, and also bent both of the pedals. Fortunately, it still worked (although a return trip will likely finally break it). The rehearsal was unremarkable - Charlie played well, not perfect but quite excellent. People were amazed at what he could do. Charlie was nervous but was able to answer questions on the stage. So far, so good.

(to be continued)