Vienna Teng

ok, I know I've already wrote an earlier entry on Indie music. But that was in anticipation of this weekend's event, here's an account of the conference/banquet/performance today (technically last night already).

So every year since 2002 I have helped out with and attended the Monte Jade annual conference. This year, I got a great volunteer position to help Vienna Teng [her Wiki and Xanga] setup her CD booth. I have been to a Stanford event where she performed back in 2003 (I believe shortly after she started on her musical career), ever since then, her name pops up once in a while during conversations. I was very excited that I get to meet her again in person and will probably get her autograph on her CD.

I just found out during Jinzy's social mixer on Thursday night (yes, I quickly showered and changed after a pretty tough gym class to head over to a posh networking mixer in PA) that she's from Saratoga High School, and is friends with S.Pan (my friend's sister). Another volunteer at the conference, CtWang, also knew her directly from HS. How cool's that?

Vienna (her stage name) is nice and down to earth, and she's pretty too. =) Though because of the demographics of middle-aged conference participants, not many people have heard of her before, and thus we were only able to sell about a dozen CDs before the evening banquet.

However, the stage charasmatic Vienna delievered a great performance during the evening, I would have to say that other than the Qualcomm CTO's talk on wireless 3G future in the afternoon, her event was the highlight of the evening.

She was very astute in incorporating her life and her decision to transition from an engineer to a professional musician into the introduction of each song, as well as opened and closed with two memorable old Chinese folk songs that really hit it home with the majority of middle aged first generation high tech immigrant audiences.

After the event is officially over, crowds overwhelmed the CD booth, we had 3 people staffing it selling CDs, and ~100 CDs were gone within 10 min., because people wanted all 3 of her CDs: Waking Hour, Warm Strangers, Dreaming through the Noise. Money and checks were literally being throwned at us while people were grabbing CDs and then lining up for her autograph on the next table over. [ I have volunteered with the Chris Tomlin concert CD booth before, therefore I had some experiences with the art of selling CDs, and also the power of multi-packs. ]


It's a good thing that I purchased a stack of 3 CDs before the banquet and got her to sign them before the crowd learned who she is and heard her performance. At the end of the conference, she even signed a special thank you note to me on my CD cover; I also got to keep a promotion poster of h"Dreaming" with a personalized autograph on it. !! [good thinking, Sid! CtWang, Ping, and someone else got the remaining 3 posters].

I was telling CtWang on the way back that I am so excited, I can't wait to convert her CD into MP3s and load them onto the iPod. =) And she told us that she has a performance at the Palace of Fine Arts coming up in May, maybe that'll a great event for my next organized group hangout event.

p.s. Oh, Vienna Teng also taught me the trick to quickly open sealed CD packages so we can get the autograph line moving when time comes.. =) it's so much easier than fumbling around w/ the sticky and the plastic wrap! [ ask me next time and maybe I can show yo. ]