Those Jedi nights

In 2005, the great Luke Ski wrote and 13 minute 41 second piece titled "Grease Wars". It tells the story of Star Wars episode IV, A New Hope, using parodies of songs from the movie Grease.

When I first heard the title accidentally blurbed to me, I knew this could be special and on the first time I saw it performed in April at Penguicon done with Carrie Dahlby (who was dating Luke at the time), I knew it was.

Over the next 18 months, I went to many conventions with Luke and Carrie and watched them perform Grease Wars together numerous times. For a while I was keeping count and still remembered it after they stopped performing the piece and were no longer a couple.

Occasionally, they still perform the piece and at Gencon 2010, they performed it to a very enthusiastic audience. For Nerdapalooza in July 2011 in Orlando, Luke asked Carrie to join him in Orlando to perform it there and when they did the piece at Duckon in June to prep for it, I was asked how many times I saw it live and really had no idea. Even with my memory, the number of times I had seen it was forgotten in the 4+ years since it was performed at every show.

Luke and Carrie now do a podcast together called "Luke and Carrie's Bad Rapport" which I am an occasional guest (Let's call Ken) where I generally babble occasionally making some sense. When they were discussing their performance of Grease Wars at Nerdapalooza with fellow performer Insane Ian, the subject of the number of times I saw Grease Wars live was discussed and that I had lost count.

I felt obligated to recount. With the help of my LJ, I figured which cons I attended from Penguicon 05 through Windycon 06 and how many times was the piece done at each one. I also recalled the events past Windycon 06 where it was done and though I am not 100% positive of counting every performance, I can now confirm 49 times. The map lists the number of times by state:

Last seen the song performed on 8/16/2014

The first number in each state is the different events I have seen it and the second the number of performances. (Note: If I saw it done at the same convention in different years, I counted that as 1 event.)