Beautiful

Today we closed out our season passes at City Springs with their production of "Beautiful," the Carol King Musical, which is to say it was a biopic, but on stage, so I guess it's a "bioplay," which sounds like some sort of science experiment, so why don't we just move on?

Ah, there we are at the front row of the balcony as usual.  We have great seats, and the place was packed too!  Lots of people here to see this.  

Now to be honest, we know Carol King's music.  Mom and Dad had the records, and I think everyone has a copy of "Tapestry."  But I didn't know anything of her story or background, and that's obviously what this play was all about, of course using the soundtrack of her music all throughout.

The three of us really enjoyed it!  It had a lot of laughs, a lot of emotion, and of course a lot of music as well.  We've been pretty happy with the seasons here at the theater, and in fact we already have our season passes for next year.  It's great seeing the things you're familiar with, and then new things like this one.  We all enjoyed it!

And after that, we went to possibly the quietest Cracker Barrel on the planet to enjoy a quiet meal!  We all love dropping by this place, and then looking around in the shop afterwards.

Big storms rolling through again, along with a cold front.  The trees were violently blowing to and fro tonight.  The rain is still falling as I type this, in fact.  The ground is saturated.  

Speaking of which, today was the Kentucky Derby - and it was soaked!  The mud was intense, with horses completed coated by the end of the run and all those colorful jockey outfits now part of some commercial for detergents.  We watched this and again I picked the winner of the race before it happened.  Keep in mind that I have no experience on this sort of thing.  I just heard that Sovereignty won at Churchill Downs a year ago, although the weather was drastically different.  And his odds were pretty much right there in the middle.  So I picked him to win the whole thing, and sure enough, I was jumping up and down at the end to see him cross that finish line.  No exciting photo finish this year, but it has been a fun tradition watching this race as it occurs.  

Later on tonight, we continued our "Planet of the Apes" marathon tonight, leading up to us re-watching "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes," but tonight was "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," which gets better each time I see it.  These are great movies, and we're just amazed at the CGI work and how expressive the ape characters are, and how so much communication is done without actually speaking, and how we're still so invested in their story.

Okay, so we read tonight and said our prayers.  And this morning there was Team Edge practice.  Maddie's a little nervous with the big competition coming up, but this practice is great because it just keeps hammering away at that muscle memory to the point that she's doing things almost in an involuntary way.  She's doing a fantastic job, and everyone knows it.  We're all super proud of her!