Amber's Dance Performance

Amber took a dance class this semester to help her stay in shape. Santa Cruz has a dance performance where the students not only perform but also do the chorography. Between college and her job, Amber doesn’t have a lot of free time for dance practice, so she was only able to participate in one dance. This was her first dance performance since moving to Santa Cruz so there was no way Tania and I were going to miss it.

Since I haven’t seen Terri’s and Jim’s new house yet we decided to stay there. Cathy, Terri and Dale also went to the dance performance with us. Actually, Jim also wanted to go, but we only bought five tickets a head of time we had to call the day of the event to see if there were any more tickets available but unfortunately they were sold out.
Jim and Terri have got themselves a nice place. Tania told me it had a huge back yard but when I look at the window the back fence was twenty or so feet from the house – what’s the big deal about that I thought to myself. But when you go out and take of look, the back yard space on the North side of the house is just as big as the part behind the house and the South side is about three or four times larger than that. They have nice garden started on the North side. They are growing a little bit of everything. They had a fresh crop of radishes in and boy where they hot – they must have been Mexican radishes.

We wanted to spend some time with Amber so we left Terri’s house around 11:00 AM to have lunch with Amber and hang out a little. It was one of those rare days in Santa Cruz with no breeze, no clouds or haze and temps in the 80’s. It sounds nice but the only problem is that when weekends like that come around the San Joser’s come to Santa Cruz in droves. We stayed away from the downtown area to avoid the crowds. Amber took us to Café Brazil which is close to house. Everyone enjoyed there food, but the star of the menu was a parfait made with Acai berry smoothie mix with granola and a mix of berries on top. We had two orders as appetizers for the table.

After lunch Amber took us on a tour of the campus and then we kicked back at Ambers. This a peice of art work on campus that is a fav hang-out/meeting place of the students.

One thing I have noticed about places where the weather is always cool – they are never prepared for the occasional heat wave. The theater that the dance performance was is was hot. Everyone was fanning themselves with the program. I felt sorry for the performers up on stage dancing. They must have really been hot.

Most of the dance numbers were very good, good dancing and fun to watch performances. Some were more like mini plays with dancing than a traditional dance performance. Amber was in the last number. When it was time for what I thought was the last number, I was looking all over the stage for Amber but couldn’t find here. Then all of sudden, Amber pops out of trash can. Yep, that’s right, a trash can (you gotta love modern dance). It was fun to watch up on stage again.

We had late night desert at the Saturn Café in Santa Cruz before heading back to Terri’s house. The next morning Tania and I drove back home. The back held up well for the long drive – good news for the vacation this summer – but Tania did do most of the driving.

PS: As I am writing this the Lakers are finally making a run in the 4th (game 5) – it’s about time guys – this isn’t supposed to be another close game – read the memo