Four Friends and a Sing-a-Long

For those (the only other two besides Carrie, Colleen and Gina who read my blog) of you who don't know my college friends, this is Carrie (in purple), Colleen (black without glasses) and Gina (black with glasses). Carrie, Colleen and Gina are my best college friends. Really, the best part of college for me were my friends. I got a decent education, I grew up a little but I met some great life long friends. I met Carrie and Colleen my freshman year and they were nice enough to befriend me although nearly half of their high school went to WSU and lived in our dorm. We spent hours and hours pulling pranks on each other and drinking. At the end of freshman year, Carrie and Colleen got all weird on me and decided to join sorority's. I was left without friends who I wanted to live with, which is where Gina comes into the picture. Gina was also left without a roommate for sophomore year...so we figured we'd take the great leap and live together (we knew nothing about each other, for all I knew Gina could have been some prostitute or wacky World of Warcraft freak). Luckily enough, everything turned out for the best including the fact that Gina also liked Carrie and Colleen!

The four of us had many great adventures throughout college, it's too bad blogs didn't exist when we were in college because I'm sure we'd have pages of stories and maybe even some drunk blogging! Now that we're all grown up, I don't live in the greater Seattle area, everyone else has kids and I busy myself with horses and biking, we don't see much of each other. In fact, it had been almost two years since the four of us had gotten together. So much time had passed that Colleen had had a second child, Carrie cut up all her credit cards and Gina had had her first child. A get-together was due.

Since Colleen should have been an event planner rather than a computer person who does things that I can't describe, she came up with the idea that we should go to a Sound of Music Sing-a-Long at the 5th Avenue theater in Seattle. I was under the impression that we all loved the familiar musical but Gina had never seen the movie. She was a good sport and didn't tell us this fact until we were at dinner. While Colleen, Carrie and I had all seen the movie too many times to count, we were not prepared for what attending a Sound of Music Sing-a-Long entailed.
1. It's a good idea to dress up as there's a great costume contest. This is no half-assed costume contest where one can put on a nun outfit and call it good. This is the type of contest where participants better be ready to be the character (ie, sing like Maria or the Vontrapp children or the baroness).
2. Most people who attend sing-a-longs can actually sing. I can't so I didn't sing during Edelweiss because I can't hit the high notes.
3. Men should only attend if they are gay OR seriously trying to impress a new girlfriend. The men who attended who were not in either of the latter categories, looked miserable.
4. Be prepared for a little heckling. I was worried this would ruin the movie but the heckling was good natured.
5. The movie is long, it gets longer when the audience is involved.
6. Yes, this is not a play, it's the movie with subtitles for the songs so the audience can sing-a-long. The other girls thought it was a play and were bewildered with the movie came on the screen. Carrie and Colleen recovered in time to sing "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria."

We're now waiting for a Grease sing-a-long to come our way. It was good to see the girls and good to finally have a photo of the four of us where we didn't have bad lipstick, bangs or look all pasty because we spent all our time in frat. houses.