“Freaky Friday” on a Monday and the Blessing of Community

As we fairly often do, we rode up to Salt Lake Valley with friends this evening for dinner and a play.

Tonight, meeting with still other friends from the neighborhood — twelve or fourteen, altogether — we ate at the Tin Roof Grill in Sandy, which none of us had ever visited before.  Everybody seemed to enjoy their meals, and those who had desserts sang their praises.  My wife and I ordered (and shared) the White Bean and Steak Pizza and the open faced Hot Smoked Roast Beef Sandwich, both of which I really (really) liked.

Then we headed over to the Hale Centre Theatre, not far away, for a performance of the Disney musical Freaky Friday, which shares common descent with the 2003 Disney film of the same name that starred Jamie Lee Curtis and the unfortunate Lindsay Lohan.

Freaky Friday is pretty light fluff, but it was entertaining, funny, and, as is almost invariably the case at the Hale theaters, well performed.

The two leads for this evening — Scout Smith (as Ellie Blake) and Bailee Morris (as Katherine Blake) — were very good. In fact, I thought that Scout Smith was remarkable.

My favorite of tonight’s songs was probably “Bring My Baby (Brother) Home,” which is sung by Ellie, Katherine, Mike, and two officers in Act II, Scene 3.  But I also liked “Busted,” in Act I, Scene 6, which is performed by Ellie, Katherine, and the Company.

As I’ve said before, I think that the Hale theaters are real Wasatch Front treasures.  They’re not typically offering King Lear or Sartre or Anouilh or Samuel Beckett, but if you like live theater and you like to have fun, if you’re a bit tired of the usual Hollywood fare, if you don’t want to be disgusted or to be obliged to shelter your children, and if you haven’t done so already, you should try them out.

I must say, too, that one of the ways in which our membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enriches our life is its strengthening of the ties within our neighborhood.  The community in which I grew up in Southern California was a good one, and reasonably warm.  But I don’t think that the people in that community went out together very often to sporting events or plays or concerts.  We nodded over the fence, but it rarely went beyond that.  At least, I don’t remember doing much together.  Yet I don’t believe that that community was unusual.  And when my parents moved to the neighborhood about 45 minutes away where they would spend the almost three decades that remained of their lives, it was, I think it not unfair to say, a neighborhood of polite strangers.  Our neighborhood here, however, is a very close one.  We do many things together, and far away not only on Sundays.  And I credit that to our shared membership in the Church.