Friday was a little different.
We left work and came rushing over, only to find that the gates hadn’t opened yet…and there was a line, about a mile long, to get in, with that classic “zig-zag” format you see in a line at Disneyland.
Luckily, we got in fairly quickly…and immediately got in the first signing line we saw.
It was rumored that Dolph Ziggler was signing at the station we stopped at. There was another rumor going around that Paige was supposed to be here again tonight and that she’d be at the station next door…Danielle really wanted to get her Paige T-shirt signed.
We waited for a few minutes to see who would end up where. When the first Superstars appeared, the crowd cheered…and they were headed for a booth across from us. It was Erick Rowan and Sin Cara.
Ok…we got Sin Cara yesterday. Rowan isn’t totally somebody we want to meet…we decided to stay in our line. Then, more cheers next to us — and out came Natalya. I was a bit bummed. Then her Dad, Jim, showed up. Man…
I asked Danielle if she wanted to move. She said, “No. Let’s see who we get.”
Suddenly, our line began to cheer…and out popped…
Dolph Ziggler.
Let me tell you something about Ziggler. The dude was performing for the entire line. Just like Paige, he played to the crowd and toed the line between cocky and incredibly charming. He gets up from his seat and says, “Sorry…I’m done. I have no time for ANY of you. See ya’.” He was only kidding: he left to go sign for the disabled guest line.
At one point, he came back from the empty disabled guest line, stopped to take pictures with the couple of people near the immediate area, signed their stuff real quick, then rolled his eyes at everyone else as they begged him to sign their stuff, too. With a hair flip, he went back to tend to the regular line.
When we got there, I asked if he would sign for our mutual friend, Tania, who couldn’t make it out.
I don’t know if it was the volume in the place or if Friday fatigue was hitting me…I spelled her name wrong. Ziggler could have just signed her name, as was spelled to him…but he notices and says, “Wait…T, A, N, A, I?! That’s ‘Tawn-ay’, bro! That’s not how you spell that. I don’t even know your friend and I know how she spells her name!”
So, we had some laughs and Ziggler says, “Let me spell it again…” So, he writes over the original spelling, then realizes that you can see a “T”, followed by some scribbling. He puzzles over it and asks, “I think that looks like ‘TANIA’…you think she’d be able to tell? I mean, maybe if I scribble all fancy and professional-looking, she’ll think it says, ‘TANIA’…right?” And we just laughed. He was just a great guy.
He shook our hands and we got our photo with him.
After this, we grabbed some quick food and drink and headed out to see what else we could see.
Turns out, some pretty good Superstars were signing that night.
Kane…who didn’t look happy to be there at all. Kinda strange. Maybe he was trying to be the “Corporate” character…but I took quite a few photos from a few rounds of fans and he didn’t smile once.
A strange choice to sign: The Bogeyman…
And he’d actually sign with Hornswoggle:
After that, I checked my WrestleMania App (an attendant told me it would give me signing schedules…huzzah!) and found out that JBL and Jerry Lawler were signing…so we went to take a pic with them.
Danielle and I stopped by the Elimination Chamber to take a couple pictures of Stardust and Miz-dow. One of the funniest things was watching Stardust freak out and shriek before he would hug the person getting into the ring with them.
We were just in time to watch a Q&A session with Howard Finkel and Booker T in the NXT ring. NXT was hosting some “house shows” all Axxess weekend, so things like this were awesome to watch.
In the Q&A, Booker praised former manager, Sherri Martel, and said that he misses her each and every day. When a fan asked if Harlem Heat would ever get back together, Booker’s response was, “In this business, I always have one response: never say never.”
We stayed around a bit to do the Gratuitous WrestleMania Sign Point…
We made one last trip to the museum as we’d heard that they had added the Andre trophy…
We visited a couple of our favorite wrestlers…
We invaded a Triple H signing and took some pics of him…
And we closed the night out by watching a really fun match between Heath Slater and Curtis Axel, in which Axel took bump after bump and sold everything Slater had — then came back like Hulk Hogan. It was truly great, crowd-pleasing stuff that the crowd around us loved.
Last, but not least, caught this excellent shot of Goldust being interviewed by our local media…
Stay tuned for Part 3…
Er…that’s it.
