Last Friday was the seniors’ last day of regular classes at CVCA. They still have Senior Trip and graduation practices and graduation itself, but they are now all done with classes. That made me amazed and grateful that some of these seniors wanted to spend their first post-CVCA evening with me.

As some of you know, CVCA has small groups of students with an adult adviser, and the groups are called Connections or Connections Groups. I had a group of eight guys this year, and I tried to organize outings a few times during the year. I wanted to go to a minor league baseball game with the guys, but I am especially fond of fireworks nights at the ball park. The fireworks night that worked best for us happened to be on the last day of school for the seniors. Still, three of my usual Connections guys wanted to go, and another student to whom I am close filled in a spot for someone who could not make it; there were four eighteen-year-old guys and I, at an Akron Aeroes game.

I love the Aeroes stadium. It is small, and well kept, and the staff likes to do wacky things between innings, like have spectators dress up in sumo outfits and wrestle, or have a foot race between a guy dressed as a donut and a guy dressed as a cup of coffee. I really like minor-league baseball. And, in addition to the game and the random fun between innings, the fireworks display at the ballpark is hands-down the best fireworks I have ever seen. They are right in your face, and the shows always go about fifteen minutes.

It is a good thing that the other things are worthwhile, because, sadly, the game was not much to watch. The Aeroes got beaten 8-1, and it could have been worse. Happily, the fellowship with the guys was much fun, and we all had a good time, helped out by the amazing light show at the end.

There is still one last Connections outing for us – in a week or so we are supposed to meet at Dave and Busters restaurant and arcade, up in Cleveland. I’m still surprised that guys want to hang out with someone who is over twice their age, but I am pleased at the same time. Maybe I really did make a connection.

Last Friday was CVCA’s version of prom, the Junior-Senior Banquet. That is always a fun affair with good food and sharply-dressed people, but added to the fun this year was that I took the day off. I had been out until 3:00 in the morning to see The Avengers with some students, so I took a sleep-in day. I slept in, went running, and then took a nap. I was pretty well rested by the time Mer got home from school. The students also had the day off, so Mer had a pretty good day herself, but was still at school.

We both got ready, and Mer looked very pretty in her purple dress with long necklace. I wore my version of a tuxedo, which is a 19th-century morning coat (think Mr. Darcy in various Pride and Prejudice movie versions). We got to the Sheraton Hotel, where prom was being held, early so we could go over our brief parts in the evening entertainment.

Every year, there is entertainment in addition to food and picture-taking. Generally speaking, the entertainment goes over best when it involves teachers and staff, because the students know us, and they like us making fools of ourselves. This year, the entertainment was to give out “Academy Awards” for things like best smile, cutest couple, most-likely-to-become-a-superhero, best servant, etc. The prom was all movie-themed, and to introduce the ideas of our version of the Oscars, the faculty did small snippets from various movies. The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Back to the Future, and True Grit were all represented., in very tongue-in-cheek ways. Mer and I had the role of re-enacting all of The Sound of Music in about two minutes, as Maria and Captain Von Trapp. We had much fun with it, and the kids all laughed a lot, so I was very pleased.

After prom, there is a party hosted by CVCA parents, called, appropriately enough, After Prom. After Prom is held in a large facility like a YMCA, and this year it was held in the recreation center in Tallmadge. The rec center is really very nice, and the parents had a DJ, lots more food, board games, basketball courts, a small indoor soccer field, and a couple of bouncy-castle things. One inflatable involved four people trying to knock each other off pedestals, and the other involved two people being tied to bungee cords, and then trying to see who could go the farthest down the inflatable before being snapped back. There was also an excellent magician wandering table to table.

Mer and I got some food and sat with a colleague and his wife. We had a great time chatting, and the magician even came over to stump us with card tricks. After I ate a little, I wandered back to the basketball courts, and was amused watching the people using the inflatables. One of my students, who is in Royal Fools and is in my Connections group, challenged me to the bungee-race. I accepted the challenge, and paid for it by landing on my head once, and by landing in the wrong track once (the bungee cord snapped me over the inflatable wall between me and my student). It was fun, even though I lost.

Mer and I left soon after my inglorious defeat, but it was a fine evening. I really do like our version of prom.

Last Thursday was a long day, but a good one. We had the last Royal Fools improv show of the year, and after that, I had been invited by some students to go to a party at a house for about an hour, followed by a midnight showing of the superhero movie The Avengers.

The Fools show went off well. I was a little anxious about the audience, as it was a pretty evening out and there were other CVCA events going on that night. When we started the show, it looked as if there were about sixty people in the theater, which is a small crowd for us, but they were enthusiastic. People must have kept coming in, though, since I finally noticed a little way into the show that the theater was pretty full. I’m guessing we had over one hundred people, and they were really into the show. It was pretty spectacular.

The show was the longest show we have ever had – it went about an hour and forty-five minutes. Most shows go about an hour and fifteen minutes. This show went long because I try to let the students pick the games/skits they want to do, and they are very good at not picking the same games. As such, we had sixteen games for this show, when twelve or so is more normal. Plus, I always throw in a game for the graduating seniors, where I throw them a party and I have to guess what quirks the individual students have. I was pleased that even though the show went long, we never lost the audience.

The show itself went quite well. There were one or two moments where the energy and laughter ebbed, but that is pretty good for a show that long. The students felt it was the best show they had done, and on the whole, I was very pleased with what they did. It was pretty easy to play to an audience that was so energetic; I think after eight years of doing this, we are finally consistently getting improv-savvy crowds who know how the various games work, so they are quick with suggestions and quick with laughter.

Some of the games from the evening included:
– A slide show of the best pizza places in Italy
– A scene about a giant mechanical rabbit
– The tension between two siblings as one could throw a lacrosse ball and one could not
– An angry customer returning a fur coat to a store
– A short-order cook struggling to keep up with the pace of things, and the restaurant owner dying from a broken leg
– Justin Bieber giving a press conference on how he roasts marshmallows
– A musical chairs game about love in a lamp store that involved a genie
– A man being forced to marry a woman because she misunderstood him (while her hands were played by another Fool)
– My giving a party to four seniors, including a man who loved all Disney princesses

A good show indeed. After the show, we always have a social time where the audience can munch on snacks and chat with various Fools. I use this time to clean up, and I was pleased that even though the show ended at 8:45, by the time I was ready to go at 9:15, everyone was leaving. That was fortunate, because I wanted to get to the student party.

A couple of weeks ago, a few students invited me to a student party that was then going to go see a midnight showing of The Avengers. After mulling it over, I decided that when a bunch of eighteen-year-olds invite a forty-one-year-old to do anything with them, he really needs to go. I figured it would be a small party of eight or ten people, and then we would go see the movie. How wrong I was! There were at least thirty students at the party, and we met up with more at the theater, so that there were probably forty CVCA students at the movie, and me. I do have to say I felt pretty honored to have been the only adult who was with the group. The party was pleasant – there were food and lots of fun kids whom I know, and the evening was warm and pretty. We spent about an hour there, and then headed to the theater so that we could get there at about 11:00 so we could get good seats. It was a good thing we did get there early; the center seats were mostly taken, so we sat on the right-hand side and in the back row.

I had never been to a midnight showing of a major film before. It was a fun experience. The audience was full of superhero nerds who cheered loudly anytime anyone in costume came into the theater. It was also the first time I had been to a 3-D film, which I liked okay. I’m not sure I’m so into it that I will go out of my way for more 3-D movies, but that is what the students wanted, so I went along with them.

The actual film was great – one of the best superhero movies I have ever seen. It had a great balance of action and humor, and it was fun being in a theater where people cheered and laughed in all the right places. I headed home right after the movie, and got to bed about 3:00 am. Yes, I had already planned on taking the next day off, which was a teacher in-service day, so there were no students at school anyway. I do like being around students – they make me laugh, and I laughed a lot on Thursday.

Every year, we give Aunt Mary the same birthday gift. It makes it a little predictable, but she seems to like it, and we do too. Aunt Mary always gets a meal with us, followed by CVCA’s musical of the year. This year, since we were going to a Saturday matinee, we went to lunch together before going to see Cinderella.

We met at the Royal Buffet, a Chinese buffet restaurant near the mall in Cuyahoga Falls. We are all big fans of buffets, and the Royal Buffet does good Chinese. In fact, Mer and I were introduced to it years ago by a man who was a missionary to China, and his Chinese wife, who proclaimed it the best Chinese food around. They also have a hibachi grill option included in the price, where they will grill up various meats and vegetables that you want. It is nice to have an on-the-spot option like that, in addition to the five or six tables of buffet food. Needless to say, we ate well.

The CVCA matinee of Cinderella began at 2:00. We had good seats, about three rows back on the left-hand side, where I had a great view of the orchestra. The orchestra was made up of two pianos, three trumpets, a few woodwinds, and a trombone, and they sounded great together. I am always impressed by the musical talent of our students.

The set and production of Cinderella was pretty fantastic. The CVCA stage is not very friendly to plays, as it is shaped like a triangle, there is no “fly” space (space above the stage to raise and lower scenery), and there is no backstage to speak of (they use hallways as backstage storage). So, the props people tend to have to get creative, with scenery that either rotates to become other scenery, or sets that are highly mobile. They also have to allow for huge numbers of actors to be on stage for big dance numbers, since there were thirty or more people involved in the ballroom scene. In this case, the bigger sets were at the back of the stage for the palace ballroom, and they used smaller sets for other things, like Cinderella’s home. It worked well.

The play actually had some pretty terrific special effects. Brandon, the assistant director on this musical, came up with some very clever ideas on how to show magic. He used shadows cast onto a screen that was back-lit. So, when the pumpkin changed into a carriage, you could see it happen as a shadow outline. A tree became the fairy godmother, and Cinderella’s plain dress became a beautiful (and poofy) ballroom gown, all using the same shadow effect. It worked really well. Brandon also used a projector to cast clock “hands” on a clock that was mounted above the set, so we could see midnight approaching all though the ball scene. It was great.

The play itself was a lot of fun. CVCA did a slightly different version of Cinderella a few years ago, but this one was funnier. The step-sisters were hysterical, and the step-mother was obnoxious and evil. The prince’s steward also was over the top, to good comic effect, and the king and queen had great moments too. There were four puppet mice that interacted with Cinderella, and that was fun. Cinderella was well cast:  she was winsome and could really sing. The actor playing the prince was great in his role, although he was probably not at the same singing level as Cinderella; but that mattered little, as he had few solos and had a large number of speaking lines, at which he excelled.

So, even though it was the same old birthday present, we all had a good time, and still were home by 5:00.

Last Sunday, Mer and I got to go to a second wedding reception for our friends Matt and Clarice, who were married last month. It is a little unusual to have a second reception, but our best guess was that it was a chance for some family members who could not make it to the Friday wedding to celebrate. We also think Matt and Clarice are worth celebrating, so it was all good!

The reception was held at the Hudson Country Club, and it was very beautiful. The windows looked out onto the golf course, and Mer and I grabbed a table next to a huge window so we could see better. A couple of former CVCA students (one of whom was a founding member of my improv group) joined us, and we had a delightful time talking and eating. The food was fabulous, and copious. It is amazing that Mer and I are not massive. We were later joined by two other founding members of the improv group, and we got to see another half-dozen former students wandering around. It was a very comfortable afternoon with good people.

Mer and I did manage to get on the dance floor for a couple of dances before leaving. We also took four cupcakes with us, which we loved, since Matt and Clarice had a cupcake tasting party a year ago, to help decide on their wedding cake. It brought back fond memories. The only slightly down-side to the afternoon was that we did not get to see much of Matt and Clarice, since they had hosting duties. Hopefully we can catch up with them for a mini-golf outing once Meredith gets out of her swamped-with-grading time of year in a couple more weeks.

Saturday was “my” day, and I decided to do a bit of a double feature. I headed south to Canton with Mer to the dollar theater, to see the movie The Vow. The Vow is a story loosely based on the true story of a woman who is in a car accident and loses several years’ worth of her memory, which includes all of her memories of her husband and even being married. The movie explores how the couple deals with the difficulties of being married to a complete stranger, and some other family complications come in as well. It was a very solid film, and I was surprised that it was not more sentimental. It was a fairly thoughtful treatment of the material, and I liked it.

After going home and eating, I took Mer to the new-to-us Cuyahoga Falls Cultural Center. Neither of us even knew we had a cultural center. It turns out to be an old public school building that now houses a small theater and holds several community-focused classes, like dancing and woodworking.

I had brought Mer to the Cultural Center to see the improv group Point of No Return. My friend Brandon had sent me an e-mail from the group announcing auditions. Brandon figured I might want to pass the information along to the students in my improv group, which I did. But it also made me aware that Cuyahoga Falls had an improv group, which I had known once and forgotten. It also turns out that the founder of the group is one of the computer service vendors I deal with – one of the vendors who are in charge of CVCA’s off-site backup. It surprised me, and I was looking forward to seeing my vendor in the group.

Point of No Return has an ambitious schedule:  they practice two hours a week, and have shows about twice a month. They have a suggested admission of $5.00 to help them cover costs. Mer and I got to the show about an hour early because I misread the e-mail (I thought the show started at 7:00, and the doors opened at 7:00). These things happen. I was able to visit some with my vendor, Bob, who was very hospitable.

Mer and I got good seats in the front of the small theater. Point of No Return has about ten members, but on Saturday there were only six people who could perform. Sadly, the audience was small, around twenty people. It was unfortunate, because the show was fun. I had not been to an improv show since going to Vancouver with Mer two years ago, and it was fun to be an audience member. The group did a couple of new-to-me games, and they did some interesting twists on a few games I did know. They have a couple of musicians in the group, and so they involved music in two different games, which is always amazing to me since the actors have to make up the songs on the spot. The skits went well, and Mer and I laughed a lot. It was a fun evening, and I plan on going back fairly soon.

Every year Mer takes at least one field trip to see some literature-related theater. This last Tuesday, we went with almost all the senior class, plus Mer’s junior students, to see Actors’ Summit’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

I was excited to see the play; it is one of the funniest plays in the English language, and the previous week the director had come to CVCA to speak to some of Mer’s students about the play. He stressed the importance of timing and of getting the lines exactly right, since the play depends on sudden reversals of language for plot twists and for most of the humor.

We pretty much filled the theater, and on the whole, the students behaved very well. The director did speak to one student who was quietly talking during the introduction of the play, and that more or less warned the rest of us to keep quiet. The set was simple, with a few pieces of furniture and a back wall/door at the back of the thrust stage. The wall/door could be rotated to a second set to suggest the change of location from a London home to a country home. Over the whole set was the word “Ernest” in two-foot-tall letters, and the lighting designer used lights to highlight the word. I liked the lighting design (the shadows of “Ernest” being cast were subtle and cool), but I thought the word hanging in our faces like that was a bit too much; I thought it would have been more subtle to use just the shadows created by the lights, but it was a minor point to quibble with. The wall/door part of the set was excellent, with good detail.

The casting of the play was very good, especially the two male leads. They stayed in character and delivered their lines smoothly and with good wit, and they played up physical humor without being distracting. The play was wonderfully funny, and it was an excellent production.

After the play, the director and some of the actors had a question-and-answer session with us that lasted about twenty minutes or so. I felt as if our students asked some good questions, and the answers from people involved in making the production were interesting to hear (about learning lines, about set design, etc.).

After we all got out of the building (the theater is in downtown Akron, and is on the sixth floor), we got on the buses and headed to Chapel Hill Mall, to their food court, for lunch. Mer and I got to sit with a few colleagues and chat. We had about an hour total, and were able to spend about thirty minutes talking and laughing. Everyone got on the buses more or less on time, and so it was a Wilde-ly (ha!) successful field trip.

Saturday was Mer’s day, and she did not have plans for a good part of the day, but in the mid-afternoon she called the bluffs of me and Aunt Mary. I had never seen the movie The Sound of Music, and Aunt Mary had never seen Star Wars, and we had a tongue-in-cheek deal where I would watch The Sound of Music if Aunt Mary would watch Star Wars. After years of this, Mer got both movies out of the library, and she wanted to watch them.

We started with The Sound of Music because it was the longer movie and I was afraid it might be hard to stick with if it got late. I enjoyed it. The music was fun and familiar (I knew many of the songs), and although the story line was only loosely based on real events, it was still a compelling story. I liked the optimism and quirkiness of Maria and I liked the stern, no-nonsense Captain Von Trapp. I had a good time finally getting to see a cultural touchstone.

After the movie, we all headed over to Five Guys Burgers and Fries for supper. Aunt Mary had never been to a Five Guys, and I really like their food. I was craving burgers, so Aunt Mary and Meredith humored me. It was a good meal, although Aunt Mary finally had to ask the management to turn down the music slightly in the restaurant since we were having trouble hearing each other, even at the same table.

After supper, I grabbed a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream for me and Mer to munch on during the movie, and we went home to settle in for Star Wars. I was pleased to be seeing it again – it had been awhile, and I had actually been thinking of seeing it again. The only serious downside to the film was the bane of library DVDs – it was scratched in several places, and so froze or skipped in three or four places, but did make it to the end of the film.

I do not know if Aunt Mary enjoyed the film or not, but I was very impressed at how she was following it. She asked several very intelligent questions along the way, and it was not until after we finished the film that we found out that she had never seen a science fiction film before. That impressed me all the more at how well she was able to track with what was going on, especially since so many of the characters do not speak English in the film.

After the film, Mer and I headed home, as it was fairly late. It was a good day – Mer did the right thing by making us sit down and watch the films together.

Sunday was Easter, and we went to church in the morning. It was good to be home in time for Easter, which was the plan, so that we did not have to be traveling all day on Easter itself. Meredith is in the start of her busy season of grading, so she spent much of the day grading, but it was a pretty day, so I asked Mer to join me for a walk on the short walk in a park, on the Daffodil Trail.

The Daffodil Trail is a little over a half-mile long, and it is lined sporadically with lots of different kinds of daffodils. It is very pretty when in full bloom. My guess was we had missed the peak by about a week or ten days, and that turned out to be correct. There were still a few bunches of hardy flowers in bloom, but most had gone by. It was still a pretty walk, and I was glad to get out in a park.

A couple of years ago, CVCA started up a lacrosse club, and it has since become a full-fledged team sport. One of the guys in my Connections group is on the team, and Friday was a beautiful day, albeit a bit cold, so I decided to go to part of a game. Mer used the opportunity to “sports surf” and see bits of softball, baseball, and tennis, as well as lacrosse, so that she could see as many of her students as possible. I remembered to bring a folding chair, and so I was able to sit within ten feet of the field. I had only ever been to one lacrosse game before, and that was twenty years ago in college, so my knowledge of the game is a bit sketchy.

I liked it. I later had to find Jon, my student, and have him explain the rules on who gets the ball when it goes out of bounds (if it is a shot on goal, the team closest to the ball gets it; otherwise, the other team gets it), but other than that confusing rule, I could follow the game pretty well. I only stayed for about half the game; we were winning by a large amount when I left, and I had arranged to meet a colleague at my house so he could pick up some scrap metal to recycle it. With the school year winding down, I’m not sure if I’ll get back to another game, but I did like the competition, and was surprised at how easy it was to follow the ball.

A couple of years ago, Mer came up with the rather brilliant idea of deliberate touring – the idea that wherever you go, you should check it out as tourists. So, we have been deliberate tourists in Chicago and Maine and now Alabama. Keeping with that rule of thumb, I booked us into a Cincinnati hotel for our layover on our way back home from Alabama. Cincinnati had the advantage of being a good day’s drive along our way home, and it was a good-sized city that we had never done more than drive through before. So, even though we would have only a few hours in the city, it seemed a good place to spend the night.

We confirmed that we are inefficient travelers. We stop a lot for gas and bathrooms, and we always eat a sit-down meal rather than eating in the car. It helps us break the drive up. As such, instead of taking seven-and-a-half hours to get to Cinci, we took about ten, and did not check into our hotel until about 7:00 pm. Still, we had about ninety minutes of daylight left to explore, and cities are fun after dark as well. So, we dumped our stuff in our room and headed out.

We headed east along Fifth Street for a few blocks, soaking in the sights. As with many downtowns after work hours, large sections of downtown were almost empty. There was a very pretty square that we passed, and Mer amazed me. As we passed the square, she saw the name of what I took to be a store or a small restaurant. She informed me that years ago she had read about that place, and that they were supposed to serve excellent ice cream. What a memory! She was also right, as we later found out after supper.

We turned down toward the river and passed the baseball stadium where the Reds play. We wanted to get to the river and see if there were any parks, but the river area was largely under construction. It seems as if parks are in process at the moment. We did find a small square celebrating steamboats, and that had stairs to what seemed to be a boat launch onto the river, which would be remarkable, given that the launch was right downtown. I’m not sure it would occur to me to drag my boat to a major city to launch it, but that is what it appeared to be.

By this time, the sun was setting, and so we started looking for a restaurant. We found one quickly across from the ballpark, but it was mobbed, with people spilling out into the small adjacent park. We kept going, and were starting to get a little worried that we would have to settle for a chain burger place, when we came back to the large square on Fifth Street. There were three open restaurants there, and so we got seated efficiently by asking to sit outside. It was a little chilly (in the low 60s), but we were both smart enough to have brought jackets. It was a nice place to eat and watch the square in action. There were a lot of high school students running around with “Robotics Team” t-shirts on, so I assume there was a robotics competition that weekend. It was a good meal in an interesting place.

After supper, we checked out Mer’s ice cream shop. We both got brownie sundaes, and while the brownie was disappointing (it was a flavorless sponge cake), the ice cream, hot fudge, and even the whipped cream (scooped on top by an ice cream scoop) were all excellent. I’m glad she remembered the place.

I wanted to check out more of the city by taking a horse-drawn carriage ride, and Mer liked that idea. We ran back to the hotel to use the bathroom, and then went back to the square to catch a carriage. The ride was very interesting – I never get to look around cities because I am always driving. The driver never talked with us the entire ride, which I found odd until Mer pointed out that the couple in back is probably usually cuddling and wants to be left alone. Indeed, one pedestrian yelled “Congratulations!” at us, so I guess we have that newly married look.

The tour lasted about twenty-five or thirty minutes, and covered a meandering path through the downtown streets. It passed a pretty two-block-long park that was lit by arches of small lights; the park was only fifty feet wide or so, but it was well laid out. We also went through a courtyard of a building that I suppose must be a public thoroughfare; it felt very Dickensian, as if we were in London in the late 1800s. The tour also took us past three huge and pretty churches that were all on the same intersection; if I ever get back, I’ll have to track them down.

We headed back to the hotel, pausing on the way outside a bar that had “dueling” pianos. One of the piano players waved at Mer, even though he was playing at the time. It was one of the few times I wished that I drank so that we would have a good excuse to go in – it seemed like a friendly place with great music. I could not bring myself to go in and have Mer ask for water and me order a $2.00 Sprite. So, we called it a night and got back to the room at about 11:00, and we went to bed. I was very pleased at how much we had seen in just four hours. Not too bad for deliberate tourists.

Ah – for those who do not know, Cincinnati is “The Queen City.” I’m not sure why.