Gwinnett arena to host women's gymnastics championships

The championships, hosted by Georgia Tech, will take place April 20-22. In recent years the event has drawn 14,000 to 15,000 people over three days. Preston Williams, chief executive of the Gwinnett Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the bureau hopes to top that attendance mark.

The Arena at Gwinnett Center hosted the NCAA women’s basketball championship in 2009 and has hosted numerous Southeastern Conference events.

Katy Perry brings sugar and spice to tour opener in Gwinnett ...

It takes a confident girl to pull off wearing a purple, green and black striped cat suit and ears, but Katy Perry is nothing if not self-assured.

If this “Teenage Dream” tour – which started in Europe in February and made its U.S. debut Tuesday night at the Gwinnett Center Arena – proves anything, it’s that Perry is a princess among her peers, a polished pop star who, on only her second tour, has mastered the art of spectacle.

Granted, her featherweight songs run the gamut from destined-for-decades-of-airplay (“Hot n Cold,” “Teenage Dream”) to already-forgettable (“E.T.,” “UR So Gay”), but the music isn’t what most people will be talking about.

Perry, with her inky Snow White hair and Zooey Deschanel eyes, looks like a Disney heroine, and her exuberant show, while a tad too scripted in places, is a perfect mold of her animated personality.

The story that frames the concert, played on a trio of video screens outlined in pink clouds, follows Perry through a trippy dream that sends her in search of her beloved Kitty Purry (yes, an animated cat) and the boy to steal her heart.

That dream unfolds onstage, with Perry rising from beneath the stage in a short dress dotted with spinning buttons mimicking peppermint candies to sing the fabulously lush title track of her latest album and cavort with her eight dancers.

The set is a hallucinogenic vision of a Candy Land board game plopped into the Island of Misfit Toys, an amusingly garish hodgepodge of pink frosted gumdrops and candy cane railing holding up a row of Skittles-colored stairs.

But much like Lady Gaga and Madonna before her, Perry is in the unenviable – or, perhaps very enviable for their bank accounts – position of being a married adult woman (she’s 26) whose core fan base is teen and pre-teen girls.

You can’t really blame her for selling a T-shirt emblazoned with “I Wanna See Your Pea Cock” or purring to a dancer dressed as a slot machine, “Can I pull your lever?” before kicking up her red heels to a rollicking version of “Waking Up in Vegas.” She’s an adult whose appeal lies in her cutesy sassiness.

But if you’re pushing glo-sticks at the merch tables and cotton candy in the aisles, should you also ask the crowd if they wish they had a beer in their hand or take the innuendo of “Peacock” an extra step by imitating the bird’s neck bob in a subtly suggestive manner?

Perry, though, has a ton of charisma, which more than compensates for her sometimes-shrill voice.

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