It's 8 am on a damp Wednesday morning but instead of queuing up at check in at Heathrow, Alex,Lyndon,Frankie and Tom are queueing up for the emergency visa interviews at the U.S. Embassy. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Let's take you back a couple of months. We were told in April that the initial application would not be even be processed till after the tour that the Farmer's Wife had put together. Paulette, our petitioner in Alaska and the musical director of public radio station,KBBI in Homer, told us that the only other option was premium processing "guaranteed within two weeks" for the princely sum of $1000. This was duly paid as too much work had been done and there were Mice fans from around the U.S. arranging their holidays to come to Alaska, so it had to be done. So finally in May, Paulette sent the form to the necessary government department and we waited....and waited... and waited.

Behind the scenes things were not going well. The immigration people were asking Paulette all sorts of supplementary questions about the Mice and having to supply yet more information. Paulette had to arrange things with the American Federation of Musicians as well, who in their correspondence to her, told her it wasn't the first time they had had problems with Immigration processing visas for musicians coming into the country.....it was now the 2nd of June, the form should have been back weeks ago and still the days ticked by.

Esther at Wholewheat Radio and Paulette then came up with the idea of getting the State Senators involved. Letters were sent to Senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski .Thankfully a Mr Jim Egan at Senator Ted Stevens' office took up our case. Now for all you Brits out there, you have to realise who Senator Stevens is. In line to the big red button is President George W. Bush,then Vice President Dick Cheney, then Ted Stevens. Furious emailing proceeded between Jim Egan and The Farmer's Wife and he was regularly keeping Mouse Central informed of his progress. Through his intervention things started to move, even to the extent of him going to work at midnight just so he could contact the Consul in London and see how things were progessing. Could you imagine John Prescott doing this much?

Finally on Friday 10th Mr Egan got the news that the applications were in London. However, various calls to the call centre, which arranges the interviews, could only get us one on the Wednesday at the earliest. Yikes!!

Back to Wednesday....
So the Mice finally get into the building and get our ticket, number 137. After about an hour waiting we are all seen together, as we'd spotted a group of dancers who went up together. How did we know they were dancers? Well having spent half an hour outside the Embassy watching them recreate Flashdance it was fairly obvious, I think. Though how one particular young lady in the group was that energetic that early in the morning couldn't be down to the large cup of Starbucks coffee she was drinking, I'm convinced, sniff,sniff!

In the new age, biometrics are the order of the day and the U.S. now have mouse prints on record. Yours truly had to re scan them as the computer had somehow lost them between processing and interview. Fortunately my rubber human suit did not give away my true identity, General Klak of the Glandar Star System and the puny humans still believe I am Big Tom, a jovial Welshman from Cardiff.

The interview was painless and took less than ten minutes. Interestingly they had all the correspondence from Paulette and Mr Egan. The consular did query how we managed to get a State Senator involved and we duly explained the saga.Passports were handed in to the courier service with an assurance from the young girl there that she would ring us when they were on their way. Hopefully we would get them the same day. No luck! Although we got a call that they weren't in the first batch they may be in the next that day. Unfortunately no word was heard so flying out Thursday was looking less likely.

- posted by Tom @ 8:00 AM