Our Night at the Opera

Sometimes it's okay to backtrack in a blog. I know there have been many events that have been note worthy recently, but there is one night I wanted to be sure to post about. We would like to share with you our first night at the opera.

A few weeks back (or possibly a month or so) one of my co-workers double-booked himself and needed to off-load some tickets to the Utah Festival Opera. Normally I would have passed on such an offer, but this particular performance was for children. The show, entitled The Carnival of the Animals, was a short production narrated by Michael Ballam. Had we known that he was going to be the only character, and that he would spend the entire evening reading from a chair we might have hesitated taking Ashley.

We could have taken the hint from the nice lady taking tickets at the entrance, when she stopped us and asked how old Ashley was. We told her, and she responded with the information that there was normally a four year age limit for members of the audience. She politely instructed us to see what the folks at the ticket window had to say about the matter.

After braving the line to get to the window - good thing we were uncharacteristically early - we talked to the nice girl who told us the same information about the age limit. However, she followed it up with the fact that she couldn't force anyone with a ticket out of the theater. We decided to take the chance and pray that our seats were near an exit - or at least an aisle.

With that in mind our seats were awful. From a spectator perspective they were awesome! We were on the second row of the balcony, directly in front of center stage - the farthest possible point from any one aisle. To her credit, Ashley behaved as good as you could ask for a two-year-old. She followed the story fairly well, and could be heard, through out the theatre, exclaiming, "Kangaroo!" or whatever animal the narrator was talking about at the time.

An enjoyable evening all around, and probably not our last trip to a cultured event with Ashley.