Last Sunday

P and I had a cool weekend at This New Condo... we took advantage of my new proximity to resturaunts by walking across the street and picking up a pizza to eat while watching TV Saturday night. Sunday morning P played hooky from church. We slept really late and then walked across the street to another nearby restaurant for breakfast. I know walking to a meal sounds fairly mundane, but in Atlanta no one walks anywhere. It's very L.A. in that respect. The car is king here, so it felt really cool to leave the car parked and just pop downstairs to eat.

After breakfast we took a long walk through one of the nearby neighborhoods. Lots of great "Wisteria Lane" kind of streets around here. Not all square and managed like a lot of the new subdivisions... these are long winding lanes lined with homes with big lawns shaded by tall trees and even bigger back yards. We passed a few "for sale" signs, and were pretty surprised by the range of prices... from 800k down to 300k... all on the same street.

It's interesting that I have never liked the idea of home ownership, but having owned this place for even just the short amount of time that I have, I can now imagine owning a house on a piece of land.

The Alliance Theater is premiering a production of a musical based on the movie "Sister Act." You know the one where Whoopi Goldberg plays a lounge singer who witnesses a murder and has to go into hiding in a convent where she pretends to be a nun. It's a cute movie. Made for a cute play as well.

It's called "Sister Act the Musical" and it plays at the Alliance here in Atlanta through February 25th. P and I saw it on Sunday. The highlight for me was that the music was by Alan Menken who along with lyricist Howard Ashman (1951-1991) wrote the music for "Little Shop of Horrors."

It was cute... MOST of the women cast as the other nuns were underused... the story was a little thin... and the stage was pretty boring. The music was good and the actors all had good voices. I thought the actor playing Deloris Van Cartier aka: Sister Mary Clarence was good, but she should have been a stronger singer. There were a couple of standout songs... the woman who is questioning her calling had a great number, and the three "henchmen" share a very funny song about how to hit on a nun. The woman who played the Mother Superior sounded just like Kate Mulgrew, and I kept expecting her to say, "Chakote, you have the bridge. B'Ellana, Tom, Seven of Nine, my ready room, now!"

Hard to tell what the deal is... I'm not sure if this is a test run before moving on to New York (both Aida and The Color Purple debuted in Atlanta before moving on to Broadway) or if it's just being performed here for the sake of performing it.

So it was pretty good. I laughed a lot, but I was not bowled over.

Overall a very good weekend!

Oh, on Saturday we saw this. We didn't realize it at the time, but we had bought tickets for the Open Captioned/Descriptive Audio showing. So the whole movie had captions running at the bottom of the screen. At first I thought it was going to be really annoying, but after a while I didn't even notice them, and anytime I couldn't understand an actor, either because of his or her accent or because of some noises on screen I could glace down and get the captioning! Good movie. There's a scene that takes place in a building that is being shelled by the military. While I've never been in a situation like that, it felt VERY real. It takes place in the near future so they got to play with reality a little. I liked a lot of the little "future" effects, like the moving images on bus averts and such. P liked it too and he hates anything that has even the slightest Sci-Fi elements, so that's sayin' something.

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