Dinner and a Show

Last night we wanted to meet up for dinner and a show for DFL's birthday. Unfortunately, DFL was sick, so she just went to the show.

BSA and I still met up for dinner though, and we went to Les Halles, a French restaurant on Penn Ave. Les Halles is Anthony Bourdain's restaurant, for those of you who may watch his show on the food network, and Les Halles also hosts the waiter race on Bastille Day.

I got oven roasted chicken breast stuff with goat cheese. It was very good. I've become quite fond of goat cheese. I love it's creamy texture and rich flavor. It also came with mashed potatoes, gravy, and spinach. BSA gave me a hard time about not finishing the Spinach, but come on....it's spinach. Even buttery-garlic sauce can't change that. If fact, the only Spinach dish I've ever finished is Rasika's Palak Chaat, which is melt-in-your mouth amazing.

Afterwords, we went and saw a musical called "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" It was hilarious. Definitely PG-13, but sooo funny. The theater was decorated to look like a school gymnasium, complete with athletic honor flags celebrating "Putnam Piranhas Caber Toss" or "State Champions, Putnam Piranha Luge"

It's playing at the National Theater, whose interior is painted a shade of Turquoise normally only seen on beach houses. This caused one of the actors to ask "Have you ever seen a gymnasium that looked like the inside of a Tiffany's box?"

They also bring up audience members to play some of the kids participating in the bee. The moderators ad libbed wonderfully, coming up with "interesting facts" about the audience members. Like the guy with a full beard, "Tony is the first boy in his class to grow facial hair!" The audience members got easy words like "Mexican" and "Cow" until it was time for them to get disqualified, and then they'd get some extremely difficult word.

The last audience guy up, got his word, which was some ancient goat herding term, and totally nailed it! There was this pause while the actors looked at each other, and then everyone in the audience started cheering. They found another, even harder word for him, but it was still awesome.

My favorite parts were the sentences. Whenever the kids would ask "could you use it in a sentence?" the Vice Principal would come up with these awesome, implausible sentences that were no help whatsoever. Those were the best jokes.

My other favorite part, although it was a little sacrilegious, was when one of the girls starts praying during her turn at the mic, and Jesus shows up to answer.

The songs weren't really memorable. I have no inclination to go buy the soundtrack, but it was a very entertaining show. Definitely worth checking out.