Friday, Part 2

Friday night, Scott and I went to a play at the Writer's Theater in Glencoe, IL called "The Savannah Disputation." This is where we are spoiled by our associations within the theater community, because our good friend Carol was an understudy for this play, and got us free comps to see this $55 a ticket show. Yay for free comps.

First of all, I should talk about the hours previous to the play. We went to Merle's Barbeque in Evanston, because we've always been curious what a barbeque restaurant is doing in Evanston. Evanston is not a town where one would expect to see down home cooking. French bistros and such, definitely. But hey, we're up for some good bar-b-q any day of the week. We split the buff-a-que wings and Chicago-style baby back ribs. Buff-a-que, a term that they apparently decided on all by themselves, is a combo wing with buffalo AND barbeque sauce on them. Fancy. :) Actually, they were quite tasty. The ribs were good, too, as evidenced by the clean bones left on the plate. Whenever I eat ribs, I feel like I'm a dinosaur, leaving carcasses and bones on my plate. Though I'm pretty sure that dinosaurs didn't use plates. But I digress...

After Merle's, we headed up the Edens to Glencoe. Glencoe is one of those towns that we would all like to live in if we were wealthy white conservatives who home-school their 6 children because, frankly, private schools just aren't good enough. It's a trip. The houses are all mansions, and are ridiculously beautiful, and all the stores on the main street in town were closed by 7:00, when we got there. Except Starbucks. We needed a place to relax before the show, and as we circled the main square three times listening to Sarah Masen (because Sarah Masen is perfect music for a cold winter night driving down a quaint main street that is lit up with tiny white Christmas lights, PERFECT), Scott said, "There has to be a Starbucks here. This town screams Starbucks." And sure enough, the only business in town open past the late, late hour of 7:00 p.m., the green mermaid called our names. So we relaxed in front of the gas fireplace (!) at the near-empty Starbucks and tried to avoid eye contact with the family with 6 (surprise!) children who walked in and sat across from us. I managed to supress my question about how they were doing with the whole home-schooling thing, and we headed off to the show.

The Writer's Theater is gorgeous. If you have a friend with comps, or if you have some extra money and want to splurge, check it out. It was a gorgeous space and a fabulous set (amazing what you can do with a little money!). We saw the show and we were impressed. Carol had recommended it to us, and she is a fabulous theater critic, so we knew it would be good, and we were right. It was an engaging show about two southern Catholic elderly sisters who are living their lives just the way they want to, and then a perky Evangelical Christian comes to "convert" them to Christianity. Great performances and extremely well-researched material led to lively on-stage debates about everything from Aramaic translations of the Bible to evolution. There was some confusion as a theater-goer about whether the playwright is making fun of one or the other religion, and it seemed an anomaly to me that one of the taglines for the show said something like, "finding out how two similar religions can be so far apart." Actually, Scott and I agreed that the opposite is true. We walked away thinking that both religions are Christianity, and therefore very similar. Obviously, we tend to focus more on the differences than the similarities, but the play just reinforced this idea that we already knew. Anyway, it was a good play, for the most part.

A mix of barbeque, high-end Starbucks, and good theater...yeah, that's just about right for a Friday...