The Muny's 100th Birthday

The St. Louis Muny, America's oldest and largest outdoor musical theatre, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year and we stopped by to see the party.

There were people walking around handing out little birthday cupcakes. I think we had about 20.

Sweating profusely at Forest Park wasn't super exciting to me by itself. I was most interested in the backstage self guided walking tour on offer.

There were separate exhibits on many of the professions that make the Muny work, such as set design, costume design, and special effects. I didn't realize how much of this was union work.

Bi-State Area Arting

Lydia and I popped up to historic Springfield, Illinois, home of the corndog, to visit the 57th annual Springfield Old Capitol Art Fair.

We have a race riot walking tour. Yay? Springfield trivia fact #3,567: the 1908 Race Riot led to the creation of the NAACP.

Lydia was busy looking at art but I was busy looking for women who look exactly like Lydia from behind. Spotted one!

We had fun but it was also quite warm outside. We had places to be and so had to say a sad farewell to the inhabitants of Springfield and drove back down to St. Louis.

Luckily I had something fun to distract me from my profound Springfield separation anxiety. The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis' performance of La Traviata. Damn I'm fancy.

Songs were sung, dramatics were... described, and fun was had by all.

The Coca-Cola Rooftop Deck at Busch Stadium

My buddy Jay had an extra ticket for the all-inclusive Coca-Cola Rooftop Deck at Busch Stadium. Three cheers to him!

Plus free jewelry. What a deal!

Yet a-freaking-gain it was raining. I've had some bad luck with rainy Cardinals games lately. When you have all you can drink delicious Anheuser-Busch products though who really cares? I honestly hoped that the game would be canceled so we could come back and eat another day. I'm a bad person.

They aren't dummies on the Coca-Cola Rooftop Deck and they cut you off at a certain time regardless of the weather. Sad.

The toy was a weird one this time: a pitcher's mound plate thing.

Mmmm, taste the logistics.

This guy saw that beer cut-off time was approaching so he stocked up. I would like to be his dear friend.

After the game we went on a little walkabout. It was good times all round.

Anheuser-Busch Fun

Anheuser-Busch does a really good job with employee engagement. I think they realize that happy employees that care about their employer are ultimately better employees. So it seems like there's always a fun little event on my calendar to look forward to.

This is an artist's rendering of how Tier 1 Logistics works. You see, we have the beer, and people want the beer, so we have to figure out how to get it to them.

A good example of a fun event was these town crier-looking scrolls appearing on the walls one day announcing the arrival of the Bud Light Blue Wave Tour bus which has been driving across the country promoting Bud Light to distributors. Anyway I was particularly stoked about getting a photo taken with the Bud Light Knight.

Another little thing that I've probably mentioned before but that continues to be fun are the different beers we stock in the break room. A-B owns like ten craft breweries now so there's lots of quirky stuff coming in from across the country.

We just released a Busch can with ink that changes color when the can gets cold.

Notice all those icey blue Hs. If I had to guess the temperature of this beer just by looking I would put it somewhere around "mountain stream cold". I've spent some time with the aluminum can people and the technical term is thermochromic ink.

Night Circus

Circus Flora hosted a different, more adult circus one night called Aloft Tent Takeover! and we were in attendance. I think the group was from Chicago but they didn't speak slow at all!

The sign there indicated that this was a Stinson Taliola Organ built for the Royal Lichtenstein Quarter-Ring Sidewalk Circus. Before people figured out how to electronically amplify sound from a radio or a record, the best way to reproduce a human band was with these massive mechanical organs. They are the sort of thing that would be installed in the center a carousel back in the day. I think that their impracticality makes them really cool. Surely these things have about a million moving parts that break all the time. You never see these things anywhere these days. I think the only other place I've heard one play was at the old-timey ice cream shop Zaharakos in Columbus, Indiana.