Tour life is interesting.

Tour life is interesting.

Not quite like normal life at all. It’s almost a surreal experience, and it’s flying by so quickly. Waking up at five in the morning to drive an hour and a half to a school, set up, do a show, and interact with new people every single day… it’s really amazing.

Our team has very quickly become a weird, quirky little family. We all have little things that add to the group dynamic, and make everything that make everything on tour much more awesome.

Every day we do the same thing, and going into tour I thought I would very quickly get sick of what I was saying, and what I was hearing all the time. Looking at it now half way through tour, I don’t think I could get sick of it. Seeing kids’ reactions to what we do each day, and seeing how amazing they all think it is, is the best possible thing I could see. It makes what we do worth it, even though we see the same thing every single day, we have a new group of students to inspire daily.

At one school we went to, there was one grade twelve student, who asked if he could go up on stage at the end of the show because he wanted to share something with his fellow students. He took the mic from Brittany and walked bravely to the middle of the stage and began to share his story. He talked about how his life wasn’t as good as everybody in the school thought it was, and how he had been hiding a lot of stuff about his life. The student went on to talk about how his life at home was rough for a while in the past, and that he hadn’t been the best person he could be.  As he was sharing his story, everyone in the audience was listening so intensely, and I don’t know about everyone else, but my eyes were definitely tearing up. The student was still on stage, talking about how you should never underestimate yourself, and how each one of the kids in the audience has the power to do anything they set their minds to. At the end of his story, he got a standing ovation from his school. Such an amazing thing to see, students were walking up to him after he was off stage and in the cafeteria, and just giving him hugs and telling him how amazing he is.

Seeing a student who had just seen the show, be so inspired that he wanted to go up and tell the student body how much the show affected him and how he was there for anybody who needed help was mind blowing.  It was a really cool way to see how the show affects kids every kid differently. It was also a really good reminder that, though there may be some shows where not all of the kids seem super into what we’re saying, and what we’re there to do… as long as we affect one kid, it’s all worth it.

– Jordin, LiveDifferent Academy Student, Spring Tour 2014