Talents and talent shows

Hi folks. Guess what: my girlfriend is on America's Got Talent this year! And now she's in the semifinals, holy cow. Her name is Abigail Baird, she's an acrobat, and her act is called Aerial Animation. Here's her first audition a couple months ago:


She has been working incredibly hard on this and it's pretty amazing to see her dedication and perseverance. She's been a professional acrobat and teacher for a number of years now and she has been getting by on earnings from teaching acrobatics to kids and the gigs she has been able to get here and there (it turns out making a living as an acrobat is hard!), but this could be an opportunity to perform full-time and it's tremendously exciting.

I've been pretty quiet around here lately, I have to minimize my DC time because otherwise it'll take most of my *free* time. But I still consider you guys part of my Internet family and this remains one of the best communities around, so I'm excited to share this moment in my life. I know some of you have already seen Abigail on the show, so hopefully it's interesting to know she's a distant DC cousin, in a way.

Abigail will be be on the live show again for the semifinals coming up August 26th, and she'll need votes to continue. If you're already watching the show, vote for your favorites, but maybe put a couple of your votes in for her even if she's not your top pick. If you weren't already watching, then you weren't going to vote anyway, right? So I figure you might as well give her *all* your votes. There are 3 ways to vote and you get 10 points for each voting method. But I'll go into all that a bit more in an update early next week before the show.

Anyway, I've been encouraged to post about this by mouser and other DC'ers, but in the spirit of community involvement I also want to open this up a bit more widely. Because as it turns out at least one other DC'er has an upcoming brush with fame (you know who you are), and maybe there are more! So if you've been on a talent show before, or have an appearance/audition upcoming, or you just have a talent you want to showcase, let 'er rip! Singing, dancing, expert armpit fart noises, playing the William Tell Overture on 5 parts of your body (real talent a friend of mine showcases at parties), whatever you can do, let's see it! In the meantime I'll be posting occasional updates about my sweetheart, including shameless requests for your votes.

- Oshyan