Footloose and Town

The day started out nice and sunny which meant we had to get out and enjoy the clear skies while we could. We took a walk - about 3 miles worth - into town to check out any sales that may have started for the end of season.

The big sales haven't started yet, but we enjoyed walking around town and taking some pictures of the downtown area with the much lighter crowds. These are shots of the Town Square, where there are the antler arches on each of the 4 corners on the square:

Josie went to the second floor in one of the stores to take these shots of the downtown area:

Even though it looks like there are still lots of vehicles, we can see a huge decline in pedestrian traffic along the streets in the downtown area.

It started to get cloudy and we thought for sure we would be trapped in town in the middle of a downpour:

but the storm went around us and we made it home to get ready for the Playhouse.

We had tickets for the presentation of Footloose, and we made it to the playhouse at around 7 PM:

This year, we only bought tickets for the show and skipped the dinner. As you may recall, we did the playhouse last year and included dinner and special front row seating, and we felt that we wasted that money as the meal was just so-so and the difference in cost for the front row seating wasn't worth the extra money. Our seats for this year's show were general seating and we sat in the sixth row which were good enough to watch the show.

This year, we knew one of the actors from work - Marius Handed - who does part time bartending at the lodge and played the role of the high school principal in the production. He is from Brooklyn, NY and has experience in several Broadway plays and has a very good voice. Here is one of the shots of his role as Principal:

The show ended at 10:30, and the entire cast is shown below as they took their bows at the end:

The show was somewhat disappointing as we felt that some of the actors and actresses were not cast properly. The singing wasn't tremendous, and the leading female role - that of Ariel, Wren's girlfriend in the show - was overweight and didn't have a great voice. Maybe we had expectations that were too high.

I recorded Austin's first game at Michigan State while we were gone, and there was a weather delay of over 30 minutes which took the game past the scheduled (recording) time slot of 3.5 hours. I missed the whole 4th quarter, but his team played better than expected against one of the top defenses in the country. I caught glimpses of Austin on the sidelines, but didn't see any plays where he was involved. The final score was 26-13, in favor of Michigan State, but the betting line had Michigan State winning by 27 points.

The last month of our season begins today - technically, tomorrow. With four weeks to go, we are hoping to squeeze in some fun trips before it ends...