My wife has done work for the Kansas City Symphony, Ballet, and Opera for years. We’ve been to the Symphony a lot and enjoy it enough to be regular donor’s. Carol has been to the Opera and the Ballet a few times but I’ve not a big fan of either. This weekend, however, the Kansas City Ballet did some interesting performances. They did a comedy, The Concert, where the performers purposely did things the wrong way and out of sync with each other. My guess is that very few ballet concertgoers have ever laughed that hard but it was fun in that they didn’t take themselves too seriously. The middle performance was a more traditional ballet movement called The Naughty Boy and the final piece was Rodeo which features the Aaron Copeland Hoedown. If you don’t know what Hoedown is it’s the “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” song. In fact, I had a hankering for steak afterwards. I am always amazed at professional athletes (and don’t forget for a second that doing ballet is an athletic performance) and how they make hard things look really, really easy.

Sunday we took the kids to the final weekend of the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. This was the 32nd year of the festival. While I’m not into the medieval period I know a lot of people are or at least use it as a good excuse to dress up. When I lived in St. Louis I knew some folks that went every year all dressed up (which isn’t saying much since they also get dressed up as Klingons to go to the scifi conventions). It was perfect weather for their last day of this years season so the crowds were large but not exceptionally obnoxious as I’ve seen in the past.

My point to this whole post is that while I had a ton of stuff to do, I feel refreshed and I’ve been pretty productive so far this week. Sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses. And while neither event is something that I’d like to do every weekend it was enjoyable to do something different and recharge.

The other good news from the weekend is that the Kansas City Chiefs didn’t lose. They didn’t play either.