Birthday Evening Highlights

Eats
A delicious Italian dinner with some delicious Sonoma Valley Cabernet. I don't recall the winery...I didn't save the bottle this time. It might not have made it to the car in one piece. It was not wise for me to entertain driving to the theater afterwards. And, by the way...are you ready? Complimentary coffee! I have changed the world.

Birthday Wishes
Lots of lovely birthday cards. The funny one reads: I read somewhere the average woman has sex in the neighborhood of 132 times a year....Do you suppose we're living in the wrong neighborhood? Disclaimer: This is not an attempt to share or imply anything about my personal life. Seriously.

Entertainment
Knoxville Symphony Orchestra (KSO) with Classical Mystery Tour at The Tennessee Theatre. All the best Beatles music (like there are any that aren't good?). The male KSO members were in white tuxes instead of the usual black--except for the one guy in the middle of the last row...this guy belted out some of the trumpet licks for many of the songs. Fake (and inconsistent) Liverpool accents. Costume changes (complete with the correct hair) to reflect the point in time when the Beatles may have first performed each song. At times there seemed to be an underlying buzz in the sound system. Sometimes the vocals were drowned out by the instruments. Audience members waving lit cell phones--the new version of lighters. I don't remember during what song I first noticed this, but there was a small group of young'uns doing this...later, the KSO musicians were waving theirs in an effort to get lots of audience members to do the same. Lots of people jumped on board. Not us. It was funny, though, when I turned around and saw one guy was holding up his BlackBerry. It just looked really funny. Try and picture it. At times I felt a cool breeze rushing down over me. It didn't spoil my fun. There, of course, was a gratuitous premature standing ovation. Hint: When the orchestra doesn't make any effort to look like they're done, then there's at least one encore coming. There were 3 encores. After the third (Twist and Shout), the lights came up and we beat it.

The Tennessee Theatre is beautiful, of course. It has a whole different look in the dark with the lights changing from blue to red to green to purple behind and within some of the features for whose proper names I do not know. I wish there were a virtual tour online so you could see how beautiful it is inside.