Paula Cole's 20th Anniversary Tour at City Winery

”Where do I put this fire, this bright red feeling? This tigerlily down my mouth, it wants to grow to twenty feet tall…”

It’s been 20 years since Paula Cole released an album called This Fire and had radio hits with “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone,” “Me,” and the insanely-overplayed theme from Dawson’s Creek “I Don’t Want to Wait.” Twenty years have not dulled in the slightest Paula Cole’s ability to fill a room with raw emotion.

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Overall: If you have an opportunity to see Paula Cole in concert, do it. She’s amazing.

Assorted Additional Weekend Notes

- My parents were the MVPs of this weekend, as they took ARR on his class field trip to the Nature Center (where he was the clever child who figured out you can go inside the gift shop and get to all the cool stuff), and then babysat on both Friday and Sunday evenings so we could go to various concerts.

- We went to the national high school a cappella finals on Friday night with Ivy03. We had attended the same event in 2008, and the difference in the post-Glee era is astounding. My high school barbershop quartet could have competed (though wouldn’t have won) in 2008. Now we would have been eliminated in the first round. These kids are better than many college groups from my day. Special mention goes to the group “Key of She,” who took 3rd place but stood out for being an all-female group that ran with the kind of stage presence and casual charisma you usually only see from all-male groups.

- ARR has been attending classes at My Gym for a few months now, and this weekend we moved him up into “Mighty Mites,” which is an independent class where the parents don’t participate. (I joined the cadre of dads lining the wall.) He’s barely into the age range for it, but he’s clearly ready.

- We had a very pleasant evening on Saturday with Xannoside and M. We had dinner at Orale (where ARR was very well-behaved despite us playing a bit less attention to him than usual; and he has his usual guacamole with shrimp, rice and beans) and then went home to hang out. We ended up watching the original “The Gamers,” which M hadn’t seen. And I got to retell a bunch of my stories that Jethrien and Xannoside have heard a million times because M is still a new audience for a bunch of them.

- Jethrien has purple streaks in her hair now. I do not, and I think we can all agree this is the best state of affairs.

The Arm of the Starfish by Madeline L'Engle

Adam thought he was going to a normal summer internship with the famous biologist Dr. O’Keefe. As most summer internships do not turn into international spy thrillers before you’ve even gotten on an airplane, it’s clear this one will be anything but normal.

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Overall: While I haven’t read the Wrinkle quadrilogy in years, I suspect it has aged better than this. This is a bit too loaded down with tropes I recognize and religious ideas I have issues with. More opinions to come as I read the rest of this series.