It's expensive to enjoy a bit of culture nowadays. While I love seeing live performances, I almost had to take out a second mortgage for a recent night at the theater. It's relative, I know, but the price of one ticket today is what my husband and I spent for a whole night downtown with our young children. A night that included four tickets to a play and dinner at a favorite restaurant. Even parking.
     I never considered the cost of an evening's entertainment when I was a teenager. A freshman at boarding school, I rode the bus home once a month. Sometimes, Mom told me to wear a good dress. That meant we wouldn't be going straight to our house from the bus depot. As the greyhound pulled into the station, I looked for my mother. If she was waiting next to my father in the crowd, if she was dressed in a fancy outfit and Dad's tie was still tightly knotted, I new where we were going.
     We would walk down the street to an Italian restaurant, stash my suitcase in the trunk of Dad's car in the parking lot behind the eatery, and head inside for a splendid spaghetti dinner. No meat balls, though, because I always arrived home on a Friday and we were a good Catholic family.
     After dinner, we would walk to a nearby theater for a performance. It was a heady evening. I can't tell you the name of anything we saw because it wasn't the play itself that impressed me. It was being alone with my parents and being treated like a grownup. Selfishly, I never even wondered if my year-younger sister wished she could have been with us or if she had declined, having something better to do. Probably, though, she was pressed into babysitting duty for the three younger kids. Perhaps she went to plays with my parents when I was at school. I never gave it a thought, too caught up in my special occasion.
     After I was married and had children, I wanted to expose my youngsters to as much theater as I could. In the beginning, when money was scarce, the plays we attended were free. At a park, or sometimes, a dress rehearsal at a nearby college. When I began working, though, my husband and I liked to treat our children to whatever play came to town: Hello Dolly, Send in the Clowns, A Little Night Music. I don't know if either of my children remember the works themselves, but I hope they remember the experience of being dressed up for an evening downtown with their parents. An evening that began with dinner at their favorite restaurant, Scarpelli's, a gangland-inspired Italian hot-spot.
     Hoping to repeat that experience for my soon-to-be high school granddaughter, I bought tickets to Rent at the Ordway Theater. The night began with dinner at a downtown establishment where my granddaughter ordered pasta. After dinner, we walked across the street to the theater.
     The Ordway was full of young people that night-all gussied up, just as my granddaughter was. She wore her eighth grade graduation dress with a trendy little black jacket, pearl white flip flops with pointy heels, and red jewelry that matched the trim of her dress. We had good seats and ate carrot cake at intermission.
     All in all, it was an expensive night. But, as the television commercial says, if I weigh the price tag against the exuberant whoop my granddaughter let out after every magnificent song, the evening can only be described in one word. Priceless.