closing curtain

This past Wednesday my dear friend Tali and I attended our final show together here in CLE.

While we met just after I moved back to Ohio, our friendship bloomed in the velvet seats of Cleveland's Playhouse Square.  I don't remember who had mentioned wanting to see Mary Poppins when the tour was coming through town (I adore Mary, so I would guess it was me, but I can't be sure), but we bought two tickets, met for dinner at PF Changs and headed downtown to take in the show.

At some point shortly after Tali said "wouldn't it be fun if we got season tickets?!" I agreed and we purchased our first of five seasons the the Broadway Series.  Five seasons, seven shows each season, and a sprinkling of other concerts, shows, and readings.

Almost all of these shows began with a 5:30 meeting at the Dewey's Pizza in Cleveland Heights. (I know we had Aladdin's at least once while I was doing a clean eating thing, but I really think it was Dewey's all the other times).  Very little changed in our order: I would always get the harvest salad when it was in season, and we would split the peppercorn ranch salad when it was out of season.  Toward the end of our run Tali finally came to the dark side for the harvest, and when she adopted a vegetarian lifestyle we nixed the bacon.  Our pie always had half Ryan's Inferno (again, until her vegetarianism, and then we went the Green Lantern route).  We sampled almost every seasonal pizza that sounded good to us.  Sometimes we got water, sometimes diet cokes with lime.

One of the waiters at the Cleveland Heights location became affectionally known to us as The Butt.  He gained his name because of, well, his juicy booty.  He faithfully refilled our DCs and limes, and always brought a lime back with the refill; which, in my book is a sure-fire way to get yourself a nice tip.  And then one day The Butt wasn't there.  And a few months passed and he still wasn't there.  Then like a beacon of light in the darkness I went to the Lakewood location with my family and there he was! He must have been promoted from waiter to manager and The Butt found his way to my side of town.

I would say of the 40 some shows we saw we enjoyed the majority of them.  Frankly, there was only one where we left at half time, which I think is a good sign of the quality of shows that pass through.  That show we left during, Priscilla, landed is at Sweet Moses for a root beer float, and that was just fine by me.

We saw plays, operas, ballets and musicals.  We travelled to Chicago, Osage County, South Pacific, Washington Heights, Oz, and Uganda.  We saw dancing and singing nuns, flying nannies, flying monkeys, Frankensteins, Addams Families, Cats, Beauties and Beasts, and Fiddlers.  We saw more than our fair share of drag queens, and productions about hair, be it "greasy" hair, Hairspray, or just plain Hair.  We saw green witches, green ogres, feuding families on the West Side, and plight of those in the French Revolution. We saw the stories of famous people unfold before us: Jersey Boys, Come Fly Away, Million Dollar Quartets, and Memphis.  We went to Ireland twice with Once and Billy Elliot.  We saw a dancer reach her dream in the steel down of Pittsburgh.  We saw the amazing puppetry of War Horse, and the dice rolling of Guys and Dolls.

I enjoyed reading the playbill synopsis beforehand and trying to count the number of actors and actresses who had been on any of the Law and Order shows.  Tali and I would catch up during these monthly dates. It was good for my soul, and I hope it was for hers too.

We had such a great run.  Tali is moving this week to the Big Apple to chase a dream.  I'm excited and jealous and sad all at the same time.  But I don't like to think of this as a goodbye.  I don't like goodbyes, I like "see you soons."  And I prefer to think of this not as the closing curtain to our friendship, but just the closing of the first Act.  Good luck, kid!

Act II: a street somewhere in New York City