I’ve lived in my home for 32 years. The first day we moved in, one of our new neighbors came down and introduced himself and happened to mention that his wife did in-home babysitting. Ding! Ding! That definitely caught my ear because my son was a little over a year old and I was looking for a new sitter. Long story short, she became my sitter, a surrogate mom and very dear friend. Over the years, we’ve spent many, many hours together with and without our children and she knows all my family and I know all of hers. She is like the sister I never had. I am blessed.

She is also an avid fan of professional football (and a season ticket holder for the former Rams) and would take the Great Hunter and me along occasionally to preseason games. She and her sorority sister have had season tickets for the Muny for thirty years and because of this, I have been able to tag along with her about once or twice a year.

The Muny Opera has stood in Forest Park for over 100 years and seats 11,000 people and is the oldest and largest outdoor musical theater in the United States. Forest Park itself is a gem that is bigger than Central Park in New York and was the site of the 1904 Worlds Fair. Included inside the park are the History Museum, Jewel Box and the world-famous St. Louis Zoo, voted the best zoo in the country two years in a row.

Last night I got to accompany my neighbor and two of her other friends to see the production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. What an absolutely wonderful time we had. The weather was beautiful, we had a full view of the stage (no tall people in front of us) and the music w and dancing were phenomenal.

 

This is completely opposite of our attempt to see this production last week. We were enjoying dinner at the Boathouse in the park when we started getting text messages from our friends telling us the storm that wasn’t supposed to here until later in the evening was now on its way with a vengeance.  We watched the storm clouds gathering and finally decided since we were outside underneath an awning, that we might want to go to the car and wait out the storm.

This was a great idea in theory, but unfortunately, once we got to the car, it wouldn’t start. So there we sat in the midst of the lightning, thunder, and torrential downpour waiting two and a half hours for AAA to show up. Luckily, it turned out to only need a jumpstart and we were on our way home and by the time the truck showed up, the majority of the storm had passed.