Wicked

 For Christmas, Alyssa got tickets to go see "Wicked" at the Eccles theater. She has wanted to see "Wicked" since she was 7 so it was a much anticipated outing. I told her that if we got there early enough, then we could go to The Cheesecake Factory before the show. They don't take reservations later than 5, so we got there as soon as we could(around 5:15) and had a 30 minute wait time. The weather was kind of nice that night, so we were able to wait outside.

The wait time also gave us a chance to scope out our favorite Cheesecake(which was super helpful when our food took FOREVER to arrive at our table and we had to order our cheesecake, a carry out box, and the check all at once in order to get out of the restaurant on time). I was a little sad that I didn't get to sit and enjoy my s'mores cheesecake a little more because we were so rushed.

We made it to our seats about 5 minutes before show time. It would have been sooner if we hadn't had to take our leftover food up to the 5th floor of the parking garage and then have to wait in lines to get into the theater and up the 4 stories to where our seats were. (Oh, and we both had to make a bathroom stop on the way in, as well, since the cheesecake factory restroom was out of toilet paper).

We were on the front row of the highest balcony. The view was great, but getting to our seats was a little scary since we had to climb over so many people and the railing only came up about 3 ft. I kept having visions of one of us falling over the railing because someone bumped us too hard. We weren't supposed to take pictures in the theater, but Alyssa snuck a couple. This one is the stage from our seats. It's a little blurry, but there was a big map of the land of Oz hanging down before the show started.

We brought our binoculars, and Alyssa thought it was amazing to be able to see the facial expressions of the actors. At intermission, Alyssa checked out the merchandise. She brought her own money so that she could get a souvenir. She really wanted a sweatshirt, but it was $70, so she chose a shirt, instead.

We also stopped at the theater photo booth and they took this picture for us on my phone. I would have set our stuff off to the side if I had known they would do a full body shot, but oh well.

The show was well done, and most importantly, Alyssa had so much fun. We were able to get out of the theater pretty quickly, but got stuck for like 30 minutes in the parking garage.  We got home shortly after 11 and went straight to bed, since Alyssa had school the next day. It was nice to have a fun night out with just the 2 of us.