On the Stage

Wow, just too much to type all of it out, but I'll do the best I can.

We ended up leaving at around 6:30 am on Saturday morning. Rolling into Illinois we all of a sudden ran into a bunch of tollways, non-stop in fact. Was everyone aware that Illinois makes you pay to use their damn interstate?! That sucks...we ended up paying $6-7 just to drive to Chicago.

We got to Chicago, following our directions to a T, at about 12:30-ish. Took the right exits and everything and here we were on Wacker St. The street the hotel is on. At about 1:30-ish we FINALLY FOUND OUR HOTEL. What an ordeal, let me tell you! I, through bad planning on my part, was out of gas, I had the damn gas light on while I'm driving around the friggin' heart of Chicago trying to find this hotel. Did you also know that there are NO gas stations in the immediate city area of Chicago? Don't people need gas there too? Why would you want to drive to the outskirts of Chicago just to get some damn gas. It sucked!! So, like I said, we FINALLY found our hotel after stopping to get some gas and we checked in and headed up to our room. HELLO, TINY ROOM ALERT. Good lord, this thing is like a glorified closet...good thing we're only staying one night.

We throw our stuff onto our bed and fly back down to the lobby. The bellhop dude flags us a taxi (it was pretty cool he let fly quite the whistle to get this taxi) and we got to the theatre at 1:58 pm to buy tickets to see Little Shop of Horrors that started at 2 pm. I get to the box office window and I say "Do you have any cheap restricted viewing seats toward the front?" He says "I have pit seats that are not restricted for $14.50" "I'LL TAKE THEM!" It turns out that means we are sitting in the THIRD row and only paid $29.50 total for both tickets.

What a good time, Little Shop was fun. It was good quality, just not the greatest thing ever, but it was good! We had an understudy for Audrey, that was ok, but I wanted to see Tari Kelly who was suppose to play Audrey, but that wasn't a big deal at all.

So the show is over at 4:15 pm-ish and we're off to our hotel again. We drop our Little Shop stuff off at our hotel room and head immediately back downstairs to get directions to where Wicked is playing. We are going to play lotto for Saturday night tickets (it's where you go put your name in a drawing and then 2 hours before the show they pull 10 names at 2 tickets a piece for the front row) We signed up for that at around 5 pm and then walked around a bit until 6 pm when we had to be back to see if we won lotto. So at about 5:50 we head back to Borders (where you sign up to be in lotto) and sit and wait for 6 pm. People start flooding in to play lotto and it ends up, I'd say, to be about 11-200 people with their names in this container to win tickets for Wicked. What it is, is if your name is drawn you then get 2 tickets to Wicked, in the front row, for $25 a piece. Well, MY NAME WAS THE THIRD NAME DRAWN! I WON!! How damn fortunate is that?! We wanted to win lotto for 2 reasons -- 1.) So we could see Wicked twice and 2.) So we could make sure we saw Ana Gasteyer perform as Elphaba in case she called out Sunday matinee which we have had tickets for for months.

So we head over to the theatre real quick to get the tickets and then headed back to the hotel to TRY and get some supper before we had to be back at 8 pm to see Wicked! We called room service and it was going to take 30 minutes for our food to arrive and so at 6:50 we said ok and ordered some pizza figuring it would be there at 7:20 and we could eat for 10-15 minutes and then take off to walk to the show. At 7:30 the food wasn't there yet and so I called down he said he could have it up to our room in 5 minutes I said no cancel my order because we have to go NOW. So we left...keep in mind we have had breakfast at 6:30am from McDonald's and THAT'S IT.

We got to the theatre and got in the lobby and...Ana Gasteyer has called out and her standby, Kristy Cates, will be performing tonight. AH! Ok, that's ok, she'll perform on Sunday then...probably just taking a night off since we heard people talking and we know she had performed Saturday matinee.

Still seeing Wicked! Still sitting front row! Still getting to see Kristy Cates who comes to this sit-down production from Broadway! Still excited!

Oh...oh my...the show was fantastic! So excited to see Wicke, it was all worth it, the show was AWESOME! :-) Everyone was sooo good, got to see Kristoffer Cusick play Fiyero and he was in RENT for one of the tours, so got to see a RENT alumni as well. Got to see Katie Reinders play Glinda, she was on Broadway in Good Vibrations (a flop musical!) and something else I forget, so she's good. The show was great, the actors were great, the singing was great! Bliss...pure bliss.

We get back to our hotel at 11:30 pm. We order some Chinese since that place was still open...it will be ready in 45 minutes...ok, we can do that. WE FALL ASLEEP. At 12:30 the door knocks, V gets up at gets the food, we...somehow in a deep comatose...eat our food and are out like a light again.

That was our Saturday!

I should probably get back to work...I'll sneak in a description of Sunday and get it onto my blogger here sometime today, but feel free to comment on Saturday if you'd like :-)