Friday was a pretty big day for CVCA. A donor had arranged for the popular Christian singer Michael W. Smith to come to E. J. Thomas Hall in Akron, and had arranged for the CVCA Royal Ringers Handbell Choir to open for the concert, and for the CVCA choirs to sing as backup for Michael W. Smith for several songs at the end of the evening.

Mer was very excited – Smith had risen to popularity during the 1980s, when Mer was a teenager at CVCA. She loved his music, and was very excited when she was able to buy his first three CDs as a single set for ten dollars at the concert. Mer had also arranged for us to join one of her friends from high school, Marie.

Mer got us tickets, and they were in the way-back of the balcony, but that was fine for a concert. The sound carried back to us well, and we had good command of the whole stage. The evening went off quite well. Smith is an energetic and entertaining act, with good stage presence, and good stories to tell, and high-energy songs. He is fifty-five years old, but looks great and still runs and jumps around the stage with tons of energy.

I was pleased and surprised at how many songs I knew. I think Michael W. Smith may have covered some of the songs, but whether he wrote them or someone else did, I still knew about one third of the songs, which was pretty good for someone who did not grow up listening to Smith. The choirs joined Smith toward the end of the evening, and they sang well. In fact, Smith included them in an encore song, which they had not practiced, but were able to follow. It was a good musical evening, and quite a concert for the students involved.

Saturday was a fairly nice day, with lots of sun and temperatures in the high forties. So I bought a couple of chocolate bars and took Mer to hike a trail in Akron that we had never hiked before – the Oxbow Trail, which is best known for a dramatic scenic overlook of part of the Valley. The trail was muddy in a few places, but not too bad, especially for early March. We stopped after the first part of the trail to eat our chocolate by a branch of the Cuyahoga River. It was a pleasant and quiet spot. We continued up a steep section of trail, to the overlook, which includes a platform that juts out over the steep banks of the river. It was pretty, even with the leaves off the trees – it must be spectacular in the fall. It is a great trail, and is handicapped-accessible, so I hope to be able to take Mer’s parents there when the weather improves.

In the late afternoon, Mer had plans, and so we headed off east toward Pennsylvania. We took the ninety-minute trip to Grove City College, to see a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Mer had a former student in the production, in a small but important role. We grabbed a bite to eat at a crowded Perkins restaurant, and then headed over to the college theater.

The quick plot synopsis of Measure for Measure is that a duke bails on his corrupt kingdom for a time, leaving a righteous and strict man in charge, with the expectation that he will clean up the city. The judge cleans up the town by being severe, sentencing a young man to die for getting his fiancee pregnant out of wedlock. The young man’s chaste sister goes to the judge to beg for mercy, and the judge says he will grant mercy if she sleeps with him. The play works itself out from there, ending as a comedy with a slew of marriages.

The production was quite fine. The leads were solid actors, and while some of the supporting actors were not in their class, there was no one who did not belong on stage. The set was largely a judge’s chambers, a jail, or the town streets, and worked well to support the action of the play. Mer’s former student did well, and was quite pleased we had come. By any measure, it was a good production.