Driving Queen

How long does a ride in the car have to be to qualify as a road trip?  For me and Scott, I believe the answer is the distance between Orlando and Tampa.  Including the stop & go traffic at 'malfunction junction,' (if you've been there, you know where I mean) we're in the car for well over an hour.  That's plenty of time to sing along with the radio, drive fast, and get silly.  On a recent trip to Tampa we learned the following:

* I still know every word to Debbie Gibson's "Only in my Dreams," yet can't remember what I wore three days ago.
* "The Music and the Mirror" from A Chorus Line is a car-dance-a-palooza!  I was driving down I-4 when the song came on, and during the lyric-less portions of the song I launched into some crazy one-handed dancing (the other hand on the wheel of course).  There were jazz hands, Vogue poses, and all sorts of ridiculousness.  Scott says the guy in front of us probably thought I was waving at him.  I think I looked more like I was having a rhythmic seizure!
* Scott knows most of the words to "The Humpty Dance."  I know two lines, besides the chorus: "my name is Humpty, pronounced with an umpty," and "my nose is big, big like a pickle."
* Thanks to my free trial of XM radio, we had plenty of commercial-free radio to choose from.  Since I made Scott my "music navigator," I also let him program the last 12 pre-set buttons.  I can almost completely skip the second page of pre-sets, since they include Bollywood, Greatful Dead, and Margaritaville (where, by the way, I have yet to hear a Buffett song).

We were down in Tampa to see Shrek the Musical at the Straz Center.  It was pretty good.  The caliber of the performers was top-notch, as were the staging and sets/effects.  The show was amusing, and didn't rely on the jokes from the movie as much as I'd expected (but still included the "Welcome to Duloc" song, which cracked me up).  It got long-winded in Act Two though, and I found myself wondering how much longer it would be.  And of course, I should mention that children who are too young to sit through the 90-minute movie without talking probably shouldn't be going to the two-hour live show.  Especially when tickets in the cheap seats are $50 or more.  I had a small child directly behind me, and two - including one who couldn't have been 3 - to my left.  The whining and talking was almost too much to bear.