A Musical Birthday

What with all the moving and change and starting a new job, Kyle went all out to make my birthday special this year. Last night we drove to Milbrae, took the light-rail to San Francisco and watched the musical Wicked live in theater! It was very exciting and one of the best birthday's I've had.

I spent all day running around busy getting ready for our evening. I had to buy shoes and makeup since the movers have not arrived with our belongings yet. Thankfully, Mike and Ada showed up to watch our little girls for the evening and I was able to get ready.

I had made Kyle keep specifically what we were going to see a secret since four questions into a game of 20 Questions I had deduced that my present was tickets to theater or something similar. Kyle isn't very good at secrets and he loves sharing what he has gotten someone. I suspected which musical we were going to see based on conversations he had with his family (telling me that both Janelle and Brian think the musical is a good idea narrows it down a bit since the overlap of musicals that both Janelle and Brian like is a much smaller category than musicals that Janelle likes) and our own previous conversations about what theater we would like to see, but I enjoyed making him keep the secret. However, since our tickets hadn't arrived by the time we left I had to call Ticketmaster and the cat that was out of the bag was no longer pretending to be invisible.

Riding the light-rail was a strange and disconcerting experience. It was very noisy and the groans and squeals of the train as it sped along sounded like some alien vessel. Or like it was going to fall apart at any moment.

Once in San Francisco it was COLD. Being from Florida I hadn't thought to bring a jacket and we had about an hour to walk down the street to find something to eat. After turning down about 3 homeless guys, we decided to stop at Subway for a sandwich. San Francisco is a big city and I have true confirmation that I would not like living in a city. It felt dirty and unsafe the whole time we were on the street - even the people just felt dirtier.

Yet despite these discomforts, I truly enjoyed the time I got to spend with Kyle just walking around and enjoying each other's company. I think that was one of the best things about this date was getting a lot of quality time with him. Sometimes I forget how nice it is because we are always busy with the girls and don't always have a lot of us time.

And then we went into the theater. Our seats were at the very front of the balcony, but my height fears weren't triggered because we were looking out instead of down. The musical was lots of fun. The wordplay and characters were involving and I thought it was a clever twisting of the OZ story, although sometimes it felt as if it was all going so fast. I prefer the singers from the CD, but there is just something about a live performance that is a whole lot of fun.

All in all, it was a very wonderful birthday date night for me.

*A note to those who may not have heard about Wicked before: It is a musical based on a book about the whole OZ fiasco from the Wicked Witch's side. The music and musical are awesome. The book is terrible and contains inappropriate material. Besides that its just a lousy book.