Birmingham gave us our second opportunity to see a television studio. Leslie and the Ly’s were booked to play live on the noon news at the local Fox affiliate and they invited us to attend the filming. When we arrived, the ladies were already backstage putting on their gold and silver spandex costumes and prepping their hair and makeup. The news anchors and the production team were moving around us getting ready to film. Leslie spontaneously asked us to be the background dancers for her song “Craft Talk,” which was going to be their outro. We hadn’t expected to be part of the performance, but we agreed and so Mona gave us all Leslie shirts to wear and we went into a backstage room to learn the dance moves.

The weather anchor for the program was named Mickey Ferguson and he was also the one responsible for introducing the band before their performance. It became obvious early on that Mickey was a bit of a ham. The ladies talk him the dance moves to their single “Tight Pants” and Mickey practiced the body rolls and the high kicks with them.

As a little teaser, Mickey invited Bonez and Scrappy (the Ly’s dancers) to stand in front of the green screen with him before he delivered the weather report. I can only imagine how trippy this must have seemed to the average noon news viewer at home.

The band brought a great performance of, I love the part where Leslie gets down on the ground to do her “sexy poses.” I can’t describe it, check out the video here:

After the performance, Mickey took us all back to a bank of computers behind the studio and pulled videos of himself doing goofy characters on Halloween broadcasts from over the years. Mickey is a total ham. Every Halloween he dresses up as different characters and lets loose. Check it out, he’ll appreciate it:

The show that night was insane, the Birmingham Leslie fans are intense. We played at a beautiful spot called The Bottletree. The venue has a huge and very comfortable backstage area for the bands that is nearly as big as the venue. In addition, they have two nice trailers out back where bands can stay overnight for cheap. We all danced like mad to the Leslie set.

We found a place to stay for the night with a woman named Lauren who lives in a house out in the country, which we were told is populated by wild turkeys. Lauren found out about the show from a friend who saw Leslie and the Ly’s playing live on the noon news.

Tour tip #6: Wherever you go on tour, try to meet people and get their contact information so that the next time you go on tour you have people you can contact for help booking or promoting. It’s a good idea to keep a book or a file on your computer with the contacts you build. Facebook is good for this too.