Cocoanuts, Applejacks, and Corn on the Cob

Vivian and I have been keeping busy here in Omaha, so busy in fact that we've had to designate a few "quiet time" nights this week just to give us a chance to recover from all the fun we've been having.

Wednesday night was our "date night" last week, and we got to have dinner at the Hollywood Diner and go to see The Cocoanuts at the Omaha Community Playhouse. As a life-long Marx Brothers fan, I've been looking forward to seeing this play for months, and it was worth it. The cast did a great job filling in the big shoes of comics legends that graced the screen some 80 years ago. I actually think I enjoyed the play more than the film itself. The jokes were mostly the same, but they cut out a lot of the more annoying musical numbers (Monkey Doodle Doo comes to mind) and had some much more creative routines instead, such as an "underwater" dream sequence with Harpo and Irving Berlin's Blue Skies performed on the wings of an airplane.

On Saturday, we drove down to Nebraska City for their Applejack Festival. We went to the all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast fundraiser at the firehouse, then took a walk around town before going up to the Pumpkin Patch. We took home a number of tasty things they had for sale, such as apple butter, peach butter, and a frozen peach pie. We were also lucky enough to bump into a guy from the State Treasury who was helping people find unclaimed money at his booth. It seems Vivian's had a check from another job floating around in financial limbo for the last five years or so.

We went to see the parade afterwards, the Shriners driving tiny cars in circles to help sick children and junior high marching bands playing Stars and Stripes forever loudly and off key didn't impress us quite as much this year as it did last year. We had much more fun running around the Arbor Day farm, checking out some dead tree stumps, playing jump rope with a long, limp branch, and dodging piles of horse manure along the winding paths in the park.

The Jitterbugs were having their Cowtown Jamborama this weekend, but Vivian's and I didn't sign up for a slew of classes like we did last year. We did, however, compete in the corn eating contest once again. We only got second and third place this time around, but we did get to enjoy dancing the kernels off afterwards to the sound of the Prairie Cats. Vivian especially likes dancing with the "out of towners," and it's always fun to see a few of our instructors show off for the rest of us on the floor. We also got to see Jeff Koterba wearing a pink cowboy hat. That alone was well worth the price of admission.