Last Saturday (the 14th) was Mer’s day. She did a great job. She took me to brunch at the Blue Door Restaurant, which looks like a normal mom-and-pop diner, but is run by a former Marine who has since trained as a European pastry chef. They served good breakfast, but the pastries were great, and they served a very rich hot chocolate. Yum. That was a great way to start the day.

After some time at home, Mer then decided we would be out much of the evening, so she decided we should fortify ourselves with a visit to Handel’s ice cream. We both love it that there is an all-year-round ice cream stand in Ohio. The ice cream certainly hit the spot, even in January.

We then headed south to Canton, to the dollar movie theater. Mer wanted to check out the movie Courageous. Courageous was filmed by the same people who had done Fireproof and Facing the Giants. All these films are explicitly Christian films, and we wanted to support the effort to get good Christian films into theaters.

Courageous tells the story of several policemen and the various struggles they have. Being a Christian movie, the film focuses on how the men turn to God for help and answers, but it is not done in a shallow way. I actually liked Courageous quite a lot. The film felt the most polished of the several movies we’ve seen by these Christian filmmakers. It had great chase scenes, lots of well-timed humor, and uniformly solid acting (not always a given in some of the bit roles in the previous films). With one exception (one scene), the film did not feel preachy to me, and even in the scene that was a little more in-your-face, it was a plausible scene of how a Christian might talk about God to someone who was not sure about God. It was a film that I was glad to see.

We left the theater and headed north. Way north. We took a zillion back roads to Chagrin Falls. I had never been to Chagrin Falls before, and from the brief in-the-dark tour that I got, it looked charming. I am looking forward to going back in weather that is more conducive to a stroll around the town.

Mer took us there to go to the Chagrin Valley Little Theater, a small community theater which was performing Enchanted April. At the risk of sounding horribly sexist, Enchanted April is a chick-flick kind of story. Two English women rent a castle in Italy to get away from England and their husbands for one month, and they bring along two other women as lodgers to help with expenses. After much soul-searching, everything turns out very well.

I had seen the movie, and I had seen the play version several years ago at Weathervane Playhouse. Weathervane had brought in an actual gardener to help with the set to depict the lavish gardens of Italy. I like the story well enough, but I was not sure what I would find in seeing it again.

I was happily surprised. What Chagrin Valley managed to do was a near-perfect casting of the play. Each actor was well suited for her or his role, especially the main two women. One was very guarded and almost icy, and the other bubbled over with enthusiasm and optimism. I really believed these women were feeling the emotions that they were expressing. The play went by very quickly, and it was a fine evening.

What was a little less fine was the lake-effect snow in which we had to drive home. It stopped, almost on a line, about three miles north of our house. Still, we got home safely, and it was a grand day.