20th anniversary - WKTV Journal

Van Andel Arena has been celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year, and the party is set to keep going. The venue is inviting the community to celebrate at the Halloween Open House on Sunday, Oct. 23 from 12–4 pm.

The event is free and open to the public as a way for Van Andel Arena to show gratitude for the support of the community over the past 20 years.

Plenty of activities and freebies are planned for the Halloween-themed event. The first 5,000 people through the doors will enjoy a free hot dog, popcorn, and Pepsi, and the first 2,000 people will be given a treat – a 20^th birthday cupcake.

Other activities to enjoy are costume contests, a live DJ, trick-or-treating and bag decoration stations, Halloween photo stations, self-guided tours of the building, ticket giveaways, and more, including a chance to take a slapshot on the ice, shoot hoops on the basketball floor, and have your picture taken with a Zamboni.

The event will be a fun-filled, family-friendly day and guests are encouraged to show up in costume to get into the Halloween spirit.

With his home repair show and “Dancing With the Stars,” it is hard to imagine that Robert Matthew Van Winkle, a.k.a. Vanilla Ice, has any time to do much else.

But the rapper best known for the nineties song “Ice Ice Baby,” has been touring the past few months in the “I Love the 90s” show featuring himself and Salt N Pepa with the Spinderella, Kid N Play, All 4 One, Rob Base and Tone Loc.

And since the Van Andel Arena was open in the nineties — Oct. 8, 1996 — the “I Love the 90s” show is perhaps the perfect one to celebrate the arena’s twentieth anniversary. So the arena will be reliving the nineties on Saturday, Oct. 8, at 7:30 p.m.

The entire night will have a 1990s theme to celebrate the Van Andel Arena’s 20th anniversary including a special $20 ticket price and 1996 concession stand prices.

Van Winkle made it big in the early 1990s with “Ice Ice Baby,” but by 1994 had taken a break from the music industry to become the No. 6 ranked sit-down Jet Ski racer earning a Kawasaki sponsorship.

In the mid-1990s, Van Winkle began to study real estate and started working on the side renovating and selling houses. In 2009, he started filming the reality television series “The Vanilla Ice Project,” which is on DIY Network. The show is now in its sixth season and lead to Van Winkle writing a book “Vanilla Ice Project — Real Estate Guide.”

Van Winkle continues to do a number of different things, including acting, along with performing. Most recently, he can be seen on the current season of “Dancing With the Stars” where in his first dance he performed a cha cha to “Ice Ice Baby.”

No word on whether he will do that cha cha at the Oct. 8 performance, but he will perform his hit “Ice Ice Baby.” Other nineties hits on the playlist are “Push It,” “Let’s Talk About Sex,” “Shoop,” featuring Salt N Pepa with Spinderella; Tone Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina;” Rob Base’s “It Takes Two;” “ and All-4-One’s “I Swear.”

Tickets are $20 and $35 and available at the Van Andel Arena and DeVos Place box offices, online at Ticketmaster.com and by phone at 1-800-745-3000.