The Murphy Method Blog

Caution…this is very long. I’ll post some pictures soon.

So. Gameday. Holly, Bryan, Ashley and I, along with Cap’s son Benjamin, drove to the University of Tampa, where the volunteers were parking and loading the busses, around 11 a.m., making our usual Starbucks stop along the way. There were people there who had organized everything and set everything up, so all we had to do was put up our couple of little signs and wait for our people to show up. There was a long walk from the parking lot to check-in and about halfway through people started telling us that the parking lot was full and they were parking Wal-Mart and worried about getting towed. As sorry as we were to hear that, there was nothing we could do about it. The people in charge of parking did make some calls—to Wal-Mart for example, and made sure the cars would be OK.

After check-in the vols all gathered in a large gym. In addition to our 450 stage crew there were 2,000 field cast, so it was pretty chaotic. One of the folks in charge of the cast made the announcement that they were not allowed to bring their cameras or cell phones with them and that they had time to take them back to their cars. Unfortunately, some of our stage crew thought that that also applied to them, so they walked back to their cars and were not back by the time were loaded our busses. Actually, we only left three people behind, and they caught the next wave of cast busses, but it made some of our vols a little frantic.

We rode over to the stadium, where they held us on the busses for about 15 min before letting us off, because the magnetometers were too busy to let us through. When they finally let us get off, we made our way through the craziness outside the stadium about 30 min before the game started. We took the vols to gate S2, which is where we’d been instructed to go. Holly was at the front, I was at the rear, with Ashley somewhere in the middle. We wound our way back and forth through the line—like at an amusement park, or airport security. Holly got through with some of the people at the front of the line, but somewhere in the middle they started turning people away, saying we were going through the incorrect gate and that we had to go down to S3. Total confusion.

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Well, today is it: Super Bowl XLIII. We’ve been preparing for the last three weeks and it all comes down to a twelve minute performance this evening. We had yesterday off to rest up and recover from the production party on Friday night, which was at a bowling alley. Cap went in to make sure the monitors on the stage, which blew out after the rainy dress rehearsal, got replaced and hooked up. They are all good to go.

The weather is beautiful: sunny and around 68 degrees for the high. It will be colder than that for the show, which is at approximately 7:45 p.m. after a 6:30 p.m. kickoff.

We all are wearing our game day black shirts and it is highly unlikely you’ll see any of our crew on TV. Some of our volunteers are right down in front of the stage, though, so they may get a brief appearance on screen. I’ll have plenty of pictures to post in the next day or two and I’ll give you a full report of how everything went as soon as I can.