kick off your sunday shoes

Last night, Sassy, KM, MH and I headed out to Old Town to catch DJ's performance in Footloose at the LTA. We decided to make an evening of it, and hit up a nearby Italian restaurant that came highly recommended, Trattoria da Franco. It was a quaint little place. We sat down and started talking and soon felt like those four girls as we were somewhat loudly chatting it up in the corner. Perhaps one entering from the street would not have known we'd opted out of any wine and were good to go with our water, thanks. I'm rarely in that area, but I'd definitely go back again. Portion sizes were definitely not overwhelming like many Italian places, which was nice.

The food came out so quickly that we were a bit taken aback. We saw it was almost an hour to show time and we didn't have anything to do. Our server asked if we wanted coffee... cappuccino... desserts... it was funny that Sassy replied "no, just the check" and our server apparently heard something like "we'll check", so all of the sudden dessert menus appeared at our fingertips. I must say I agree with the two reviews I'd read before dinner which said that the pasta was superb (absolutely - fabulous) but that the desserts didn't live up to the price tag. The white chocolate cheesecake was pretty good (although Sassy said "is this chocolate?" - I believe she felt that the white chocolate was just a mere poser in comparison to the "real thing") but the cannoli didn't quite deliver, in my opinion. The cannoli left me with a craving for some cannoli from Boston's North End. Mmmm. Anyhow, the point is we went from having an hour to kill to frantically making a dash to the theatre, with some ten minutes to show time. We thought we were never going to make it across Washington though... those drivers down there are so not pedestrian friendly. Thank goodness for KM's "woah woah woah woah!!!!!" proclamation, or we might have easily been 4 pancakes who never made it to the production.

I would highly recommend the show. It was really good... unfortunately though there are only 3 performances left, all of which I understand are sold out. I'll admit, I think I've only ever seen the movie version once growing up. Sometimes I think I must have lived under a rock in the 80's/early 90's. I've spent the years since and my Netflix subscription trying to make up for lost time. MH was bummed out about our seats. She'd warned us that we were going to be in the back of the theatre... second to last row. As we walked in, we couldn't quite visually place our seats since most people were already seated. We were quite surprised to realize that in fact the theatre map had been displayed opposite of the norm and we were in fact on the second row. Upgrade!

Anyhow, DJ was absolutley superb as boy-crazed Urleen. I don't know... it was hard to be convinced that DJ could ever be that into boys... just kidding. The two that played Rusty and Willard were my favorites. Man, did Rusty have a voice! Favorite eye-candy of the evening had to be the gentleman playing Chuck. We walked out of the theatre with an itch to go dancing. Not sure if that's on the horizon for the weekend, but definitely something I miss about Miami. As KM drove us back to the metro (much thanks again), we were in awe that there are so many people in the production who work full-time jobs like us and still make time to do a two week production like this. Very impressive.

Well there's nothing to lose
And there's nothing to prove
I'll be dancing with myself...