{field trip} Alvin Ailey at the Detroit Opera House

Spring arrived this week to the tune of snow squals, high winds, and minorly frigid temperatures, and it just keeps on coming like that. This kind of snow is wasted on the spring. In December, even in January or February, the beautiful, white, dancing flakes filling the air would make life feel cozier and more beautiful, but in March they're just pitiful and they make me feel cold. At noon I'm freezing just sitting in the house and I still have to convince myself to suit up and head out for a run. Calvin and I have been sneakily bumping up the heat a couple of notches every afternoon and snuggling under blankets on the couch to get cozy enough to read. I'm sure it's a mental thing, since it when it was in the single digits back in January we had no complaints at all. Calvin would even spend hours outside playing in the snow. No, it's not that the thirty degree temperatures are really a problem, it's the constancy of the thirty degree temperatures even in mid March that's getting us down.

We heated things up a bit today, though, by joining some of our homeschooling friends at the Detroit Opera House for a special mid-Friday performance by the Alvin Ailey dance troup. Stunning, rhythmic, emotive, sensual, amazing...there are so many ways to describe the performance. It was a shortened version of their typical shows, including excerpts from their piece Grace and the entirety of their signature piece Revelations. We loved it so much we considered grabbing tickets for one of their weekend matinees, but what we really wanted to see was Grace in its entirety, and they were only performing that on Saturday night, which we decided was too late for Calvin. I hear they come to Detroit fairly often, tough, and if they come next year we'll be sure to get tickets then.

Overall, defintiely an A plus for the Friday afternoon trip, which included lunch with friends afterward at the Detroit Beer Company, followed by a ride (twice around) on the People Mover. And we weren't even freezing.