Weekend: Seinfeld in Reading, Longwood, Olive Garden

My big adventure for the weekend was going to see Jerry Seinfeld perform in Reading (which is about an hour from my house).

How this happened was all a bit convoluted. As a Christmas present, I had given my husband an IOU for tickets to a Jim Gaffigan show in NYC for this past weekend (April 10-12 — he was playing there). We have enjoyed some of his videos and so that seemed like a fun activity. But I hadn’t bought tickets yet because it’s a busy time of year so we were sort of playing it by ear. Then I found out that Jerry Seinfeld was also doing shows in Reading this past weekend — so I mentioned that as another stand-up comedy option. While it is not hard to get to NYC from my house it is quite a bit easier to get to Reading. No offense to Jim Gaffigan — who I do still want to see at some point! So if we were going to do comedy, we were leaning toward Seinfeld.

Anyway, I came back from Japan thinking we wouldn’t be doing either as our daughter had a jazz band competition on Friday night that involved getting her somewhere and getting her home. I thought the 16-year-old would be doing tech for a show and would need rides too. While we have coverage for our little guy every other Friday night, usually our sitter takes him to her house, as she has a kid the same age and they do a sleepover. So the 11-year-old would have been home by himself for a while and while I’m fine with 30 minutes, I’m not fine with a whole evening. But it turned out I had the dates of the high school show wrong, so the 16-year-old was available for a very light touch babysitting gig (he helped him with mac and cheese making after the 11-year-old did it wrong the first time…). I just needed to find a ride for the 14-year-old home from the jazz band competition, which I was able to do. So then I went on Ticketmaster to get tickets and the only two left for the 7:00 show were…right in the front.

I mean, literally, the front row, center, right in front of Seinfeld. I’m not sure why these weren’t taken as they were not over-the-top expensive. He’s also not an “involuntary audience participation” kind of comedian so I wasn’t actually worried about that (it’s not like the “splash zone” at Sea World or something….) I got them, we dropped our daughter off at 5:15, and drove to Reading for the 7:00 show.

It was funny, as you might imagine. It’s good to laugh for an hour! I also appreciate that Seinfeld is truly doing this for the love of the game at this point. He has no need to be up in front of an auditorium of people in Reading PA. He just likes being on stage and making people laugh. And so that is what he spends his Friday nights doing. (This photo is of the empty stage as obviously no photos of the show itself!)

Anyway, it was a fun start to the weekend. On Saturday I was up early (jet lag, still!) and went for a run. Then I went, solo, to Longwood Gardens. I like to see the tulips and the early spring blooms. No one else had any desire to go (OK, my husband would have but he’s trying to get his runs in to train for Broad Street and that’s when it worked). The flowers were lovely and, having left at 9:50 a.m. I was home by 1:10 p.m. having felt like I got my spring adventure in. Also, it was good to go early as the place was getting more crowded by the minute.

I then took my daughter shopping at Brandy Melville. This store is…something. We found a few things and then went to Starbucks. Then I went outside with the 11-year-old to climb trees. Our Kwanzan cherries are almost blooming — a few blossoms have been popping out and my guess is the next 24-48 hours they will be in full bloom. Old Kwanzan cherries also make for good climbing, and I think the 11-year-old has been in just about all of them. When the 6-year-old came home, we grilled steaks for dinner and ate outside and then did some more playing out there. I crashed at 8:30 p.m. I kid you not. Not sure what’s going on there.

Sunday was church and various kid activities — basketball and parkour for the 6-year-old, plus a playdate, tennis for the 14- and 11-year-olds, tutoring and Scouts for the 16-year-old, plus some more tree climbing, running, etc. Then in the evening, my daughter had been hatching a plan with a friend of hers to go to Olive Garden to get the new rigatoni alla vodka dish they’ve been advertising. So I took the two of them plus my younger two boys to our local Olive Garden and ended the weekend that way. What can I say, the salad and breadsticks are really good. I am also grateful to be in the kid stage where it is possible to take 4 young people to Olive Garden and have it be…fine. Not totally relaxing, but not bad either. We have an upcoming Best of Both Worlds episode on this topic.

Now it is back to work and the final stretch before Big Time is published in 3 weeks. If you have ideas for how to spread the news about it, please let me know!

In the meantime, if you want a book you can read now, check out the novel Dog Person from my friend Camille Pagan. Here’s a picture of Max the poodle with his new reading material (and yes, Max needs a haircut…)