Night at the Muny

We bought tickets to see the play Grease last night, Thursday, at 8:15pm. Little did we know that our adventure would start at 6:45pm and end at 10:49pm. I packed a small picnic with a bottle of red wine. When we normally go to the Muny, we leave at 5:45pm to stand or sit in line to wait for the free seat sections which open at 7:15pm, one hour before the show begins. It's equivalent to nose bleed sections at a baseball game. You have to bring binoculars if you want to see anything. But this time, we bought tickets. Even though the moral of the story is not worth emulating, the music and dancing are great.


So...Tim and I set out to park our car in a quick get away position so we can beat the other 2,000 people and not sit in ridiculous traffic. We would have walked if the weather was not so volatile. It's about 2 miles from home, but we walk it all the time...however, the rain would make it a miserable walk. We could see the storm blowing in, so we set up our picnic under these two huge trees and barely felt any rain. We just finished eating when the buckets of water released from the sky. We put our picnic supplies back in the car, walked up the hill and had an hour to kill before the Muny started...I didn't plan on eating so fast. But it was a pleasant time to sit by a stream under our umbrella and talked for 30 min. We then walked around this gazebo in front of the Muny and made our way to our seats.




We called Mama Padgett because it seems to only rain when she is passing through for a night headed to Nashville from Chicago or vice versa. We dried our seats off and sat with all the other die hard Muny fans hopeful that the rain would stop. It was perfect timing. The storm blew over and completely stopped raining at exactly 8:15pm. For a while we thought the show would cancel but the clear sky coming from the Southwest gave us much hope. They swept the stage and the show was a blast.


Tim and I scooted out as everyone was applauding the cast members and ran down this long hill that we previously hiked up. I was in flip flops and with every step I was praying I wouldn't slip. We get to our car and noticed that our car was the only one facing the opposite direction on this whole street. Hmmmm...Tim said, "OH, maybe we got a ticket!" But no ticket, just confused. So we proceed to drive opposite the traffic in hopes that it wasn't a one way street. However, we never saw signs of a one way street and we noticed earlier that a white van drove the same way we did. No one was out of the Muny yet...we finally come to the intersection with other cars lined up at the traffic light...oooooopppsss! There was the ONE WAY sign and we just laughed as we tried to merge with the other traffic...playing cool. As we were merging, this motorcyclist was not paying attention (looking down at his bike) and he left a large gap as the traffic started to move again. So Tim whips in there, and in a matter of seconds we hear this horn and "Whoa!" from the guy. He almost ran into the back of us! Where was he looking while he was driving. Scary! Anyway, we get home in 3 minutes...record time. We were rolling with laughter because of what we did and it usually takes 10-20 min. to get home.


So I don't know if the moral of this story is understanding that we were graciously spared of violations for performing innocent illegal acts or if we will do it again because it worked so well. Hmmmm...Tim is the extreme ethical person of the family (sorry mom and dad...you know I love adventure) so we will probably not do it again...only remembering our record we set.