Pay Day

Every Friday when Anne would get paid I would call to get a report on her paycheck from Advo.  The checks were never very big because it was a sheltered workshop but that didn't matter to Anne.  She would talk it up big time....It was a big one this week!.......I'm getting pretty rich!........You are not going to believe my paycheck this week!..........I've been working my butt off folding towels and earning money!.......I earned it!.......She had plenty of 1-liners.  After playing it up for several minutes, I would finally coax it out of her.  Holding back her giggles, Anne would proudly announce her weekly wages:  $7.42!!! (or something in that ballpark).  It was great to see Anne so proud of a hard day's work.  Advo was a great place for her.

Fan Fair

Going to Nashville for the country music festival was the event of the year for Anne.  Anne went several times with Mom and Brett, and I got to go with them a couple of times.  Anne would save her paychecks every week to keep as spending money for Nashville.  There were tons of concerts in the afternoons and evenings and basically every popular country star converged on Nashville for the week.  Anne couldn't get enough.  In the mornings, the convention center would be lined with booths for all the record labels.  The labels would rotate the artists in during the day to sign autographs and have "photo ops" with the fans.  The first couple of years we took turns waiting in line like everyone else. Each of us would get in a line, and then we would rotate Anne to whoever was closest to the front of the line so that she could meet the most "artists."  Sometimes we would wait in line for 2 hours to see a really big star.  Anne liked filling up her autograph book, even though they just looked like scribbles (we had to label each page so we knew who had signed it).  She also liked to eat at a favorite pancake restaurant every year.  It has a reputation of having famous country music stars stop by for breakfast.  We went there the first year and saw Heidi from Trick Pony.  Every year after that we had to go back but I don't remember if we ever saw anyone else famous.

For whatever reason, there were tons of special needs fans like Anne that also converged on Nashville for Fan Fair. Something about country music, maybe the catchy songs, or easily understood lyrics was a big draw for Anne and all her friends.  One year we noticed that they let all the special needs folks in early before they opened the convention center to the rest of the fans so they could get the prime spots in line.  Anne figured out that they got to go in early and she wanted to go in early too.  It worked out because that year we had taken a wheelchair for Anne so she didn't have to walk around in the heat all day.  One morning she plopped down in her wheelchair and said, "Let's go!  We have to get there early so we can get in with all the Handicaps (that was her term for everyone in wheelchairs)."  We asked Anne why she got to get in early with "the Handicaps".  She said, "Well I've got a wheelchair!"  To her, she would not have been included in that select group in previous years, but this year she had figured out how to work the system.  Pretty sweet deal.