Summer at the Bowl: Part 2 of 3

When last we blogged, we covered the first pair of concerts we attended at the Hollywood Bowl, the Tchaikovsky Spectacular, featuring our new favorite faux dad Bramwell Tovey, and Holst's The Planets.  We saw The Planets on a Tuesday, and that very Friday, 8/25, it was back to the Bowl to see the Gipsy Kings!  I will admit to not knowing a lot of Gipsy Kings music, but the 3-4 of their songs I have on my running iPod, I enjoy very much.  We figured they would be high energy and would draw a great crowd, all of who would be ready to dance the night away!

This was Chris' final Friday off for his summer work schedule, so since he was already home, we elected to travel together, buying advance tickets ($7 each versus $12 at the door) to use the nearby Lakewood Park and Ride location.  We also planned to take a full set of picnic options, since we'd have both of us available to carry backpacks outfitted with coolers; in addition to our picnic fare, we invested in some heavy duty acrylic wine glasses and grabbed one of the bottles of wine, a Calcareous zin, from our well-stocked wine fridge.

The Lakewood Park and Ride had a number of departure times from which to choose, but we went with the earliest option, 5:40, figuring that would give us a good amount of time to ride the bus there and finish our picnic before the music started in earnest (you could still eat and drink while the show was going on, but once everyone gets crammed into their seats, it's hard to say - spread cheese on crackers - without elbowing your neighbor).  At 5:15, we left the house, easily finding the Park and Ride location, due to the huge group of folks sporting coolers lined up next to a series of huge buses.  We showed the attendants there our tickets and hopped aboard!

On the Park and Ride.

Staring straight into the sun.

Although some of the buses were of the standard city transportation line variety, we ended up on a much nicer motor coach style bus, complete with a bathroom and everything!  While I didn't end up using it, since our drive in traffic took a bit over an hour, it was nice to have it should we (we - heh - as if Chris also has the tiniest bladder known to medical science) have needed it.  We brought a few magazines with us to read (National Geographic and Popular Science - yeah, we, um, party pretty hard around here), and it was nice to enjoy being chauffeured in style while we kicked back and relaxed (the people behind Chris in the shot above even started their picnic early, cracking open their wine on the bus about 10 minutes after we left Lakewood).  

About halfway through the trip, I looked up from my magazine to see that Chris was rather unwillingly bonding with the gentleman in front of him:

Can you see Chris' legs?

Looks comfy, right?

As we drew nearer to the Bowl, this dude finally awoke from his nap and took a selfie with his lady friend seated next to him.  Chris took this opportunity to politely photobomb them, and when they remarked upon this, I popped in to snark, "well, we figured since your head was in his lap the entire trip, maybe you wanted a shot of him, too!"  The guy raised his seat, remarking, "oh, you should have told me!"  I wanted to be like, do you not normally know where your head is?  I'm pretty damn clumsy, but even I tend to remember where I've placed my head at all times.  

Anywhoo, at the Bowl, we hopped off the bus and headed through security to our seats back on the stage right side of the Bowl.  We were the second row back for this show, and we started busting into our picnic, much to the delight of the friendly older couples behind us.  We all discussed friends living in Phoenix and shared stories before the show started.

High time for wine time!

Mmm!  Wine, apples, and prosciutto.

I initially misspelled prosciutto here,

and the other option Chrome gave me

was "promiscuity."

Yes: wine, apples, and promiscuity.

Eventually, the show started, and after hearing a few songs from a lovely young lady as the first act, the Gipsy Kings hit the stage.  They were great, and we very much enjoyed bopping along to their music, even if we only knew a handful of their actual songs (one of those being Hotel California).

The crowd at the Bowl

The Gipsy Kings!

After the concert, we hit up the restrooms one more time to be ready for the long ride home, but for me it didn't matter too much, as I wound up falling asleep on Chris and napping for most of the journey.  Hooray, Park and Ride!  They dropped us in Lakewood, and we finished up the 10 minute stretch home, arriving just in time to wake up the dog and put everyone back to bed.

The very next Tuesday, 8/29, it was back to the Bowl once again!  As I may have mentioned in Part 1 of this post series, we ended up getting tickets for 6 concerts, and 5 of them were within a 15 day span.  We specifically picked this set of shows for the amazing performers and experiences, but I'd be lying if I said this wasn't becoming an awful lot of late nights pretty far away from home.  We'll plan better next year for sure.  Like on the dates mentioned in Part 1, Chris was coming from work, so we did the "Chris drives and Amy attempts to avoid the weirdos on the light rail and they both meet at Union Station and then ride the shuttle to the Bowl" deal, which tends to work pretty well for us.  

Unlike past Bowl trips, however, this time we actually ate at one of the on-site restaurants, The Wine Bar by a.o.c.  Given the number of people attending concerts at the Bowl, you need to make reservations decently far ahead of time for the restaurants, so when I started planning our Bowl trips a few weeks ago, this was the only date where we could get a reservation, and I snatched it up.  We picked a 6:45 reservation, figuring this would give us enough time to enjoy dinner and still be in our seats before the show, while allowing us time for travel to the Bowl.  As it turned out, we were standing in front of the gates at 6:15, pondering whether The Wine Bar would let us in early.

Instead, we had the epiphany to use this time to check out the Bowl's Museum, which is also just a few steps away from the main gates and is totally, completely free (whether you're there for a concert or not).  The Museum stays open until about 30 minutes before each concert starts, and it has a bunch of fun exhibits where you could easily spend as much or as little time as you'd like.  We had a good time wandering through the two floors, looking at old programs and learning neat trivia (the Bowl's had five or six different shells throughout the years, and two of them were designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright).  The second floor seems to be dedicated to rotating exhibits, and we enjoyed the current one on Jazz at the Bowl.

Two nerdy former clarinetists

with a picture of Benny Goodman.

After we said goodbye to the lovely docents at the Museum, it was through the security gates and on to dinner!  The Wine Bar features lots of cute little tapas options, and we do like ourselves a good tapas place.

Our bacon-wrapped date snack

with my prosecco and Chris' Manhattan-esqe thing.

Overall, the food and drinks were great, although the food itself was a bit overpriced for the quality.  It was good, to be sure, but at that price point, I would have expected things to be a bit more flavorful; I guess we essentially were eating at the fancy-pants equivalent of a restaurant inside Disneyland, though, so that does make sense.  As we were finishing up, Chris stayed to pay the bill, and I headed downstairs to the popcorn stand to grab us some dessert.

A medium half caramel corn and half cheese popcorn.

We'd seen tons of folks carrying their popcorn buckets while attending our other shows, and we were ready to try some out on our own.  The popcorn stand offers four different flavors: regular/butter, caramel, kettle (slightly sweet, but not as sweet as caramel), and cheese; they also allow you to mix and match however many types you want in one bucket.  Overall, it was pretty darn good, although this medium for $5.50 was WAY more food than we needed (I think we ended up eating 1/3 of it total).

Since we were again on the stage right side of the Bowl, we headed out the back gate near the main concourse, through the parking lot for the VIPs (Chris: "and I'll take that car and that car and that car"), past various and sundry Phil members hanging out before showtime, back through the much, much smaller side gate and up the giant hill to our seats.  We just had time to settle in and do a quick bathroom run before the show started up in earnest.

We were stoked to see that Bramwell Tovey would once again be our maestro, and we settled in for an entertaining evening (well, we settled in after standing up for the national anthem - did you know the Phil does this for each of its concerts?  It's quite lovely, and the entire crowd sings along).

Bramwell Tovey,

who seems to be one of the most delightful

humans on earth.

Not my picture, perhaps obviously.

Although we'd love to get a beer with him,

should the chance ever arise.

Tovey led the Phil through Stravinsky's "Fireworks," and then it was on to the main event - Lalo's Symphonie Espagnol, Op. 21, which was written for both a violin soloist and the entire orchestra.  Our soloist tonight was none other than THE Joshua Bell, an amazing artist (perhaps best know for being the solo violin on the soundtrack for the movie The Red Violin from a few years back).  Everyone sat back to be astounded, and we absolutely were.  Not having heard him live before, we both thought, okay, he'll be great, sure, but everyone's heard violin soloists before.  Not like this, they haven't.  He was totally exceptional, and it may have spoiled us from hearing violin solos in the future, quite honestly.  It's hard to overstate how amazing Bell really was, and it was an honor to hear him play.

The entire Phil,

and a close up of the video screen

showing Bell.

Superb camera work, non?

A funny aside - the lady next to me 

had binoculars, and she kept pulling them up

to her face and starting right at the jumbotron

showing Bell.

I was like, are you counting his pores?

Jeebus, lady.

Whatever floats your boat, I suppose.

After intermission, the Phil came back and delighted us with more Stravinsky, this time Petrushka, a score for the ballet about a puppet who may potentially be real instead (no, not like Pinocchio - weirder, in fact).  Like he did before playing the 1812 a few weeks ago, Tovey gave us a short run-down of everything we'd hear, keeping us laughing while enlightening us to the main themes of the piece, before the Phil started.  Seriously, he's the best.  The piece was great, and after the show, we headed down the hill back to the shuttle bus, into the car at Union Station, and back to Wardlow to retrieve the truck.

And that's when we hit a snag.  As we attempted to turn left around the corner to get to the parking lot with the truck, we noticed that the street was completely closed off and at least 10-15 police cars, forensic vans, and other medical personnel were on the scene.  The parking lot was cordoned with crime scene tape and several officers were turning away folks coming into the station, attempting to ride the Metro.  The officer we spoke to mentioned that we could try waiting for 30 minutes to see if any more information would be available as to when we could take the truck home, but after 20 minutes of seeing absolutely zero movement by anyone, we decided to head home and pick the truck up in the morning.

Welcome to Long Beach!

While Chris drove me to the station on his way to work the next morning, I hopped on the website for our local paper, the Press-Telegram, and sure enough, we learned what happened.  It's kind of anti-climatic:

That's it?

No shootings or stabbings or anything?

Honestly, I feel kind of cheated.

Also, the gap between the train and platform

at that station is like 4 inches.

Dude, what is up with you?

All in all, it was a really exciting night, and we can't wait for our final two shows, starring even more amazing performers!

Later!

Amy