Symphony in the Park

We went to Symphony in the Park! It's a free concert with limited seating in the Cuthbert Amphitheater. Last year I got tickets but was sick; I remember staying home and reading Karen Lord's second novel in J's garden. This year I tried to get tickets on the second day they were available but that was too late. Meanwhile, D. and his friend S. signed up to work at the Instrument Petting Zoo, where kids get to try six instruments and doing so wins the kids a t-shirt, and for volunteering they got free tickets too. She's a flute player and D. is clarinet, which were two of the six instruments, conveniently. After they headed off to the concert with her mom, I still wanted to try to go, and it occurred to me that since people could get up to five tickets, there were probably a lot of spares, some of which would be turned in at the ticket window. So J. and I went, and sure enough, asking if people had turned in spare tickets netted us two of them, one from an older lady with lavender hair who had entered the gate ahead of us and came dashing over to give me her spare, and one from the big stack of 15-20 or more that they had behind the counter.

We looked at D. and S. as they helped the kids try the instruments, and we got some food, and we sat on the lawn, and we enjoyed the first half of the concert, then we strolled away again and headed home. The music was fine, but I especially liked it when a goose or two would fly low over the amphitheater as if none of us were even there. The other thing that's funny (to me) is that having never been there before, I have long had a firm mental image of the amphitheater that is facing the opposite direction from how it actually is. I wonder if I'll go enough times that the reality will supercede my mental image or if I'm stuck with both of them.