Wes & Erica celebrated their first wedding anniversary last month!

As of April 27th, I have been a Mrs. for a year! <3 <3 Congrats to me & Wes! <3 <3 (here are some mush barf hearts to commemorate the occasion, LOL) All kidding aside, I am thoroughly enjoying married life and we had a lovely anniversary. \(^_^)/  I usually take a million pictures but I must have been too starstruck to remember to on this trip so there aren't very many pictures on this blog post.

To celebrate, we decided to go to Dallas to see The Darkness (remember that song, I Believe in a Thing Called Love, in the early 2000s?) in concert. Wes & I don't exactly share the same tastes in music but we both love The Darkness. I was so excited when they announced their Back to the USSA tour and I was ten times more excited when I found out they'd be playing at The House of Blues in Dallas. And even better, the show was on a Wednesday night so I got to take some vacation time from work.

On our way down to Dallas, we stopped in Ardmore to eat at Two Frogs Grill. I say that I want to eat there every time we drive to Texas but we've never gotten the chance to stop. We purposely skipped lunch so we'd be hungry by the time we hit south Oklahoma so we could eat there. Haha! Lunch was good. I got the fried shrimp, green beans and fried okra...and I ate it ALL. (Sadly, no pictures were taken before I devoured it.) Fast forward a few hours to 7pm - concert time!!

The House of Blues in Dallas is a pretty ritzy place. It looks like a bland brick building from the outside but they definitely did a good job with the "abandoned warehouse renovation" look on the inside. And it is definitely a blues venue. There are paintings throughout paying homage to the blues greats (none of whom I was familiar with). Being the overly excited hyper-fan that I am, I walked us to two incorrect entrances before we found our seats. We were seated on the balcony but still had an amazing view of the stage. (I'm too old to be on the floor with the mosh pits anyway... balcony for me!) We walked in during the opening band, Junk's performance. They were quite awful. Their sound was too hard for me. Wes, the expert in metal music, confirmed they were terrible and not metal. LOL

Next was RavenEye. They are a British rock band (no confirmation from Wes of whether or not they are metal). I have never heard of them but they were really good. Like Wes and myself, they have never been to The House of Blues so we were all experiencing our first time together. I have two short videos of their performance on my Instagram. After the show, they were at the merchandise booth selling their own cds. I didn't buy one (I know, I'm terrible) but I did tell the drummer they did a really good job. Compliments also support emerging artists, right?

At 9:30pm, Justin, Dan, Frankie and Rufus took the stage. It was time for The Darkness!!!! They were wonderful and so.much.effing.fun. I'm not a music journalist so I will just describe their performance in bullet points.

• They opened with Barbarian and closed with I Believe in a Thing Called Love and played a variety of songs from all of their albums in between (but their set was mostly centered around their first album, Permission to Land). 
• In between songs, Justin interacted with the audience. He invited a small child on stage but she didn't want to participate. He then invited an elderly man and a teenager to come up and dance with him during Dancing on a Friday Night. 
• They had lights on the stage that flashed naughty words during certain songs. 
• He taught us all dance moves for I Believe in a Thing Called Love.
• They played my absolute favorite song of theirs Love is Only a Feeling. (short video on my Instagram)
• They came out for an encore and Justin rode on a security guard's shoulders and walked around the main floor through the audience. He then thanked the security and photographers (and asked them to only use "slim & flattering" pictures of him)... what a nice guy!

The Darkness put on an awesome show and this was probably one of the most fun concerts that I have attended. I really wanted a concert t-shirt but they didn't have a merchandise booth. (;_;) I now have seen all three of my favorite bands: Goo Goo Dolls, The Darkness and Weezer (and I'll be seeing them again this summer!) Yay for wedding anniversary success!