A blast of blues amidst Culture at Mt. Tam's Mountain Theater

We have this budget, and put a fair amount of effort into keeping within budget, contrary to our city, state and federal government. Didn't intend to say that last part. My fingers did it. Anyway, it has a couple of major expense classifications, mandatory expenses and discretionary expenses. Within discretionary is entertainment. For a long time this was broken down further, into Cultural and Other. My interests are firmly in the Other category, but Susan sometimes steers us into Cultural. We've now abolished those subcategories in the interest of less record keeping required, but the classification remains in our minds. Sunday's event was Man from La Mancha at the outdoor Mountain Theater on Mt. Tam. In my mind, a Cultural event with a capital C. Well, we arrive in Mill Valley, and are bussed up to the theater, getting there around noon. Seats on the rocks are first come first served, and we have a nice central location in the sun. Temperature is perfect, fog just burned off, a slight breeze, only problem is we forgot to bring any alcohol. We are sitting there watching the crowd, and I admit to a residual sexism in appreciating the summer attire some women chose to wear. All at once there is this blast of blues from the stage, and a woman's voice, belting out a song a la Katie Webster or Aretha Franklin. I look down at the stage and a slight woman in a red polka dot dress behind a mike, and nearby, two women and a guy also behind mikes. I can't tell who has this great voice. They're all singing. I grab the binoculars to check it out, and the big voice is coming from the woman in the polka dot dress. Lara Johnson. Her link songs don't compare to what she did at Mountain Theater. That warm up act made the day for me, moved it clearly out of Culture and into Other. I put a youtube video up of one of her numbers. The video wanders all over, but you can hear the music. The day went on, I actually enjoyed the stage performance of Man from La Mancha, and then we walked back down the mountain to where the cars were parked, about 6+ miles. The trip down was a nice series of trails and back roads, but for a change there were at least 100 other people walking the same route, so not our usual hiking experience. An aside, we've been getting some unattributed taking of blog content so inserting © 2009 backpack45.com A lot of people who were clearly not regular hikers, but they were getting into the experience. A conversation fragment from behind us

we were brought up to be ashamed of our bodies, and here we are doing this wonderful thing. This is what our bodies were supposed to do

.