Last Wednesday, I took Mer on a rare mid-week date. Sadly, because we are still on our diet, I could not take her out to eat. We had out fruit smoothies at home and watched an episode of the television show Doctor Who. Once we were done with “dinner,” we headed south to Akron, to EJ Thomas Hall, where I surprised Mer with tickets to see the Irish music and dance show Riverdance.

The tickets were not cheap, so we had balcony seats. That was okay, though, because balcony seats let you see the whole stage at once; when you are too close, you have to focus on just part of the stage. We tend to like balcony seats for musicals and other big productions, and we like to sit as close as possible for smaller shows.

Neither of us can remember if this is the third or fourth time we have see Riverdance. The first time we ever saw it was back in Chicago in early 1997. Meredith took me and her then-roommate, Laura, to see Riverdance at the Rosemont Horizon out near O’Hare airport. I had never seen anything like it, and I came out of the theater just flying. It was not too long after that that I started taking Irish dance lessons.

Anyway, we do know that we had not seen the show in years, so it was great to see it again. It still has wonderful music and amazing dancing and very pretty singing. The show lasted over two hours (with a fifteen-minute intermission), but it went by very quickly. Even though we can’t go out to dinner for another few days yet, it was still good to go out on a date with Mer, especially in the middle of the week. It felt like staying up late on a school night (which it kind of was, for me at least).