Venice Diaries X

A potpourri:

The Venice Theater put on Avenue Q in their small theater,
so we had to see it again. And it was just as good a
production as what we saw at Cape Rep last summer,
including a couple of numbers not seen before.

Energetic young people again made the muppets come alive.
The part of "Christmas Eve" was played by the same
Japanese woman who was in the Cape Rep cast. It is the
rare show that you become sorry that it ends, and wish
for more.

Friday the sixteenth, we drove across the Sunshine Bridge
to St. Petersburg, to have lunch with Roz and Charles
Jacobs, old friends of Barbara from Woodcliff Lake, N.J.,
who also have a house near Tampa. We toured the Fine
Arts Museum first, small, but well-organized with some
good American pieces. We always do museums. I had
been there before, five years ago, and recall a poignant
event which occurred in an empty gallery.

Lunch afterwards at a restaurant on Bay Shore Drive.
The St. Petersburg waterfront is still as beautiful as I
remembered it -- a model of civic improvement. We
window-shopped the area, and entered several shops,
not including Bruce Watters, the jeweler.

On Saturday, we accomplished one of Barbara's greatest
wishes on this trip: a visit to the Southgate Mall in
Sarasota, to shop at CHICO'S. Having been to Chico's
several times, I can state that they specialize in making
real women look good. That was followed by soft
ice cream at the Nokomis Orange Grove, an authentic
grower and major tourist attraction.

We will drive over to Wellington on the East Coast on
Tuesday to spend a couple of days with Sue and Frank
Millard.