4th of July

Yes, this is pretty belated, but the important thing is I'm slowly but surely getting caught up :). 

Usually, Ed and I don't do anything for the 4th. In fact, I'm not sure that I've done any kind of 4th celebration with Ed before. However, when I got a groupon email about a 4th of July concert half off, I convinced Ed that it would be fun to actually go out and see some fireworks. 

We didn't want to deal with parking at Shoreline, so we parked on a side street about 15 minutes away. 

On our walk over, we saw a very unusual statues outside of a building - I would have loved to take a closer look, but we wanted to get to the concert. 

It was surprisingly easy picking up our Groupon tickets and, before we knew it, we were in our very good seats. 

While you couldn't bring any drinks with you (the only exception was one factory sealed water bottle per person), they had plenty for sale. We settled on a bottle of wine, which was poured into a plastic carafe so that we could bring it to our seats. It was a lovely treat and made the evening feel even more special. 

Soon, the seats began filling in and the music got started. 

The theme of the show was "The golden state to the silver screen"and there was a lot of good music. It started with "western" style music - the kind of frontier music you see in western movies. One of the highlights was Casey at the Bat, read by the Giants game announcer. Then, it moved onto the beach boys and ET (though ET was brought down when the family behind us did nothing as their 2 month old baby was crying. Now, I totally get why this baby was crying. I just can't believe that parents would bring such a young child to a very loud, very late outdoor concert. And, I can't' believe that when their child began crying loudly during the concert, they didn't think to get out of their seats and move to the periphery of the theater until she was calmed down). 

After intermission, they brought down a screen and ran old cartoons with the next songs (betty boop, popeye, etc.). This was very cool, except during intermission, two women showed up in the seats in front of us who literally talked through the whole songs! One even made a phone call during one. I just don't understand why people think it's okay to be so disrespectful to the musicians that they paid good money to see just because the concert is outdoors. I think perhaps because these were "groupon" seats, the talkers weren't normal concert goers, but it was just ridiculous. Finally, Ed and I decided to move to some open seats to our right that gave us a bit of space from them, as I was getting angrier by the moment. 

Once we moved, I was able to enjoy the last few songs. But, the best part of the show was yet to come! After the last song, they announced the start of fireworks and then, with the lights dimmed, with melodies of star wars singing out, the first of the fireworks began. 

They. Were. Spectacular!

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As the song ended, I had a huge grin plastered on my face and was ready to go, when "Stars and Stripes" began playing and phase two started up!! Surprised but happy, I was again taken aback by how fun the fireworks were. Now, I don't know if its just been a long time since I've seen fireworks, but they were so huge and amazing and I was just blown away by how beautiful they were. 

As the last note faded to silence, I, again, began preparing to leave when a new song suddenly began. 1812 overture, of course. And, one last time, I stared into the sky, feeling like I was 5 years old and seeing fireworks for the first time.