From Arles to Philadelphia in one afternoon

So - once again the weekend is almost over, and what did I do?

Shopping. I took a photo of the drop-dead gorgeous pansies outside the grocery store, but set my heart against buying them. This year it will be all impatiens in front - the cheapest and most reliable way to get lots of color. (And impatiens are quite lovely, too.)

After shopping, I ground my own beef from chuck and sirloin, and stocked up the freezer. Now that we have a food processor, I can do all kinds of stuff like this that I never did before - homemade ground beef! (I follow Alton Brown's tips on how to do this.)

Weekend chores, yadda yadda. This is the week in between classes for my online teaching, and I am prepping for a new class next quarter.

Sunday morning, and off to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the Van Gogh exhibit. You are not allowed to take pictures inside the exhibit, so here is one in the lobby.

I cannot adequately convey how fantastic this exhibit is. These painting are heartbreakingly beautiful. I believe this may be the best art exhibit I have ever seen.

Art critic Robert Hughes has tried to put something of the power of this work into words. For example, he calls the fifteen months Van Gogh spent in Arles (many of the works in this exhibit are from that period) a "rhapsodic outpouring of creative energy."

Then we had just enough time to drive to Broad Street, park, and share a plate of nachos at the Perch Pub. (Philadelphia is full of good places to eat, but I seem to always go back to Perch Pub.)

The Sunday brunch drink specials are $5 - Neil had a very spicy Bloody Mary and I had a pear Bellini.

Darn great lunch for less than $25.00.

Next we walked over to the Academy of Music and saw the musical Fela!

We should have read the story before we went, because the main character is Nigerian, and although it is almost all in English, we both had a very hard time understanding his accent. We got the gist of most of the play, but with a few rather comical misunderstandings (which we figured out later).

The actress who played Fela's mother, Melanie Marshall, has an exquisite, powerful voice. Her big solo in the second act was a high point of the production for me.

And on the way back to the car, we stopped by the home of the birth of The Philadelphia Sound to snap a photo.

This is the beauty of buying season tickets - we wouldn't normally make the effort to go see one individual show. There are always so many reasons why we are too busy that weekend, can't afford it, etc. But since we bought season tickets for our anniversary last year, we made darn sure that we attended every single show, even ones we knew nothing about - and I'm really glad we did.