My long weekend...

So, this weekend was very, very long for me.  I took Friday off to celebrate ExploiveWife's 30th birthday.  We spent all day shopping for a new dress, and I surprised her with 40 of her closest friends at Pappasito's for dinner.  We intended to go to a drag show with ExplosiveBrother, but we changed our mind and went to a dueling piano bar in Downtown Fort Worth, which was cool, but not as cool as I would have hoped.

Random thoughts, in chronological order:

• Grapevine Mills at 2:00 on a Friday is a great place to be.  There is hardly anyone there, and you don't have to fight people.
• Burlington Coat Factory is the biggest mass of clothing I have ever seen.
• People pushing their JC Penney cart through the mall really piss me off.  Leave it in the store!
• One of the reasons I think men hate to shop with women is that they have to visit every single store before they make one purchase.  I always feel bad when we go into a store but don't buy anything.
• There is something about seeing my wife shop for panties that gets my motor going.
• The biggest beating of all time would be to work one of those mall kiosks where you have to ask everyone as they walk by if they want their jewelry cleaned for free.  That or those massage kiosks.
• Everyone left Pappasito's complaining about how expensive it was.  They were also horribly understaffed. I don't know if that is a common thing or just that night, but the service was very subpar, even for a large group.
• The piano bar was a neat concept, but the sound wasn't mixed very well.  You usually knew what songs were being played, but if they were talking, it was difficult to hear what they were saying.
• My sister made this point:  Why do people go to a piano club, pay cover to get in, then stand around and talk?  Why don't you just go to a free bar and talk there, without all of the loud music?
• They played "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" with an actual fiddle. That was cool.

The previous night, we went to see "One Night with Queen" at Bass Hall.  Basically, they are a Queen cover band, but their lead singer was simply brilliant in his portrayal as Freddie Mercury.  He had the look, the mannerisms, the stage presence, and, most importantly, the voice.  It was downright unbelieveable how close he was to the real thing.  The band was very good, too, except they didn't try to look like the band member they were portraying.

When they started playing "Fat Bottomed Girls", the crowd went bonkers.  I dare say that is Queen's best song.

On Saturday morning, we were back to Bass Hall for

 "The Imagination Movers".  

If you aren't familiar, this is a show on Disney about 4 guys who solve problems. The show is very well done, and it actually has just a twinge of humor in it for the older people.   ExplosiveDaughter watches it often, so I was pretty familiar with it. They put on an hour long stage show where they solve a problem (natch), but there were some really funny moments in it, one in particular.

The guys were teaching the crowd how to do a dance similar to Riverdance, you know, Michael Flatley.  As they were in the middle of the song and dancing like crazy, a miniature Stonehenge dropped from above the stage to rest in front of the drum kit.  I started laughing like crazy, and ExplosiveWife looked at me like I was crazy, because she didn't get it.  It was a reference to Spinal Tap, and it was hilarious.  The cool thing was that they didn't mention it, didn't look at it, nothing.  It was just there for the small subset of people in the audience that might get it.  If you have read this blog before, you know that is my favorite type of humor.  Don't pander to your audience.  Either they will get it or they won't.  I am still laughing at this genius move, and they gained a lot of respect in my book.

You should read their story. It is pretty interesting.

So, by the time we got home that day (after ExplosiveSon's baseball game, of which I am a coach), we were pretty exhausted.  But that weekend will go down in the history books.