Long Singing Day
Dec. 4th, 2011 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aWent into San Francisco today to go to the Castro Theatre to see the Sing-A-Long Sound of Music. I've seen the movie before, but I was surprised by how good it actually is. Beautiful landscapes, great directing, moving story lines. And Julie Andrews is amazingly beautiful in the movie.
The Sing-a-Long portion was also fun. I always find music very cathartic and singing together in a large group even more so. I joined in for most of the songs, and thankfully had a big bottle of water with me, to keep my voice fresh. There were some silly props handed out at the door, which were mostly cards to hold up at various times. I didn't have any interest in trying to sort through the bag of props during the movie, and so planned to ignore them, and then lost track of the bag to no great lost. There was also a little popper, which would have been fun. They were meant for The Kiss, but some were fired off at various times. They added nice dramatic underlines to various events. Then The Kiss finally came, the air filled with pops, and you could see little electric sparks all around the hall, which was pretty cool.
So, all around, a good experience, but ... oh, so tiring.
We left the house at 10.40, got home around 6.30. We were actually at the Castro for a bit more than 4 hours and it was just jammed with people, which increased the tired-ness quotient even more.
We also had pretty rotten transit both ways. We had to carefully plan, because BART is so inadequate on Sundays, running trains to SF only every 20 minutes. Then we found the train just jammed. This was the case on all the BARTs we took. Heading toward Market Street, it was clearly brainwashed consumers heading off to do their mandatory Christmas shopping, and heading down the peninsula from there, it was tourists going to SFO.
(I'm now going to be a lot more reluctant to go into the City on a weekend in December.)
Things were made worse at our "timed" transit at MacArthur because we ended up waiting on the platform for 15 minutes, because BART wasn't even keeping to their ridiculously pitiful Sunday schedule. And then on MUNI ... our train kept getting stuck just before it got into stations, waiting long minutes and then pulling up the last 5 feet.
As I said, rotten transit, even for the Bay Area.
Also, we had a so-so lunch experience. We went to the Carl's Jr at Civic Center, which we've gone to a few times this year because Kimberly got some coupons from her mom, and we found bad customer service, too many homeless people being allowed to run rampant in the restaurant, and real confusion at how to apply a coupon. All things we'd seen when we went there for dinner the two other times, but not to the same extent. I think that'll be our last visit to that Carl's Jr, since it seems more inclined to cater to the bums of Market than to us.
The bad transit and so-so lunch added some stress to the day, and have left me more tired than I otherwise would have been, but it fortunately didn't spoil the movie-going-and-singing experience. I'm pretty much ready to collapse now, though. (And so that history article I was supposed to edit tonight will just have to wait until tomorrow night.)