Dinner & a Show

No photos today. Went out for dinner and the theater last night with Steph. It was just starting to get cooler, and it absolutely poured most of the night. I sort of like this kind of weather, but Steph doesn't like the cold very much. For dinner, we went to Hard Times Cafe. We got way too much food, I think. But it was all really good. The onion rings we shared were extremely good - very sweet onions. And the cornbread was tasty. I had the coneys, which I enjoyed a great deal. And Steph let me try a little of her veggie chili, which was surprisingly good.

We went and picked up the tickets, then took a walk to work off some of dinner, since there was some time before the show started. The show was at the Little Theatre of Alexandria, which we've been to many times before. As has usually been the case, the audience was much older than the two of us. Maybe older than our ages combined, actually. Which made the play more interesting, since it was The Gin Game, which is set in a retirement home.

A word about the play. It was going along as a comedy, it seemed, for most of the first act. There were, in retrospect, dark portents, but the audience was reacting to it like it was an episode of The Golden Girls. However, there was a particular point in the second act when it became clear we were watching a dramatic work. I can even pinpoint the exact line. The two characters, Weller and Fonsia, are playing gin and Weller loses again. And his line is "You bitch." The whole audience gasped. It was fascinating - from that point on, everyone seemed to want to keep laughing, but the play becomes increasingly dark, coming to a very dark, cynical, and challenging conclusion. I really enjoyed it. The two actors were very different, "Fonsia" using a very mannered and tic-dependent acting style, while "Weller" was much more naturalistic. But everyone involved did a really fantastic job, and it was a great show that I'm glad we saw.

After that, we walked and talked as we headed home. We both liked the show, and Steph felt a little better from eating maybe a few too many onion rings. One of us said something about the play that I think really captures it, that it was a "sucker punch" of a play. We got back to Steph's and called it a night. She is doing a Turkey Trot fun run today, so I'm glad she was able to come out last night and have some fun. Now that she's done training for races for a few months, I look forward to doing this sort of thing more often.