Jimmy Buffett and Milwaukee

I hope my readers had a good weekend. I have already blogged about our fun Friday night, and most of Saturday we were very lazy. We drove to Elkhorn and ate at a drive-in that listed “tacos” on the menu as $1.99 but “mini tacos” as $3.69. Not sure how that makes sense… Then we drove to Alpine Valley to see Jimmy Buffett. Good thing we got there about an hour early, since we had no problems getting our rental chairs and finding a good spot on the hill. Apparently they oversold the concert, and some people couldn’t get in but had to stand way back in the parking area. Jimmy himself was great, very energetic despite his age and doing everything I wanted to hear (although I was unfortunately powdering my nose for the first half of “Pencil Thin Mustache”). He did his two liveliest numbers, “Volcano” and “Fruitcakes,” back to back, and had beautiful shots of the South Pacific as the background to his most spiritual song, “One Particular Harbor.” Getting out of the parking lot (which is all grass, causing some people to get stuck) was a two-hour adventure, and we didn’t get to bed until 3 am. We did get a beach towel to cover our rental chairs, which had been left out in the storm earlier that day, and we ended up with a tiny beach ball someone sent our way after the concert was over. There were lots of beach balls and inflatable sharks being tossed around during the concert, and when I saw everyone, I thought, “I have found my people!” – they were all wearing Hawaiian shirts.

Yesterday we went to a later Mass and then had brunch at the Manna Café. We headed to Milwaukee so Travalon could show me some cool things he discovered a couple of weekends ago when he went there while I was busy with the Early Music Festival. We walked down to a beach with big rocks you can sit on, enjoying the breeze and the view of sailboats out on the lake, then we went to the Oriental Theater, which is beautiful inside, to see The Last Black Man in San Francisco. It is a sort of slow-paced, slice-of-life movie about two black guys who move into an empty old Victorian house that one of them used to live in, with a timely message about gentrification. It’s happening to us on a smaller scale in Madtown with all these well-paid people moving in who work for the healthcare software company south of town. After the movie we went to a coffee shop with plants hanging from the ceiling for horchata-flavored cold brew coffee, then we tried some different things at the nearby food court: pasta, falafel, French fries, and brownies. We sat outside, enjoying the reasonable temperature after the furnace of the previous week. When we got home, I just collapsed into bed, being sleep-deprived from our late night on Saturday. I must have caught up – I popped out of bed before my alarm this morning.

Famous Hat