Sunday, June 06, 2004

Broadway on a budget

My mother loved the theater. She started taking me to plays when I was a very small girl (well, okay, I was a very small girl pretty much right up to the time when I became a very small woman; let's say, a very young girl), and was always excited about seeing the new plays that made it from Broadway to theaters in Los Angeles. When I moved to the east coast, we always had to see a show when she visited; and in between, watching the Tony Awards was a way to keep tabs on what we wanted to see and what was probably not worth the skyrocketing ticket prices.

Those ticket prices eventually dampened my enthusiasm for trekking into NYC and catching a show. I think the breaking point for this was an evening in which play tickets, dinner, and the parking ticket we got for putting our car somewhere we shouldn't have ran my husband and I about $250. When we realized we could have bought a TV for the amount of money it had cost us for one evening out, we stopped wanting those sorts of evenings out very much. It's a lot to ask of a show to make you forget how much you had to pay to watch it. Very few shows can do it.

But I still love watching the Tony Awards, and will be in front of my TV tonight to see what I've been missing. I haven't been bringing my daughter to plays like my mom did for me, but I'll at least have her sit and watch some production numbers before bedtime. If anyone else out there is enjoying the theater vicariously through its annual awards, stop by the chat room at the Mothers with Attitude Sounding Board tonight during the show and let's pick the winners, mourn the losers, and say snippy things about what people are wearing.

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