My parents are coming this weekend and I'm really excited. I just bought us tickets to see Fiddler on the Roof on Friday evening. My dad, who dislikes cities and therefore has been somewhat unenthusiastic about the location (although I know he's glad to see me), seemed a bit more enthused about the trips after I told him. :-) For myself there are a number of other musicals I'd rather see, but my parents really like Fiddler on the Roof. I hesitated because they've seen it performed by the local highschool and seen the movie plenty of times, they've sung the songs in choir and so forth, so it's very familiar to them. But this is the first time they're seeing something on Broadway. We're a very musical family and we enjoy musicals a lot, so I was remembering my thrill when I saw my first show on Broadway, and it had nothing to do with what I was seeing. Or actually - it was more that I was seeing something for real, in person that I'd heard the soundtrack to hundreds of times. (Miss Saigon) It was better that it was something I knew and loved. And when you add to that my parents' conservative ideas, (they walked out of Pippen at intermission, for instance) it was better to stick with something tried and true.

I'm not NYC expert by any means, but I have gotten used to working there. And while my grand total of 3 Broadway shows makes me a pretty novice theater goer, it's still just enough that the whole "it's Broadway" euphoria has chilled a little bit into just a "it's good theater / music." So I'm totally pysched to be giving my parents that first "woah, cool, once-in-a-lifetime experience" type feeling.

Especially my Dad. My mom actually visited NYC for the World's Fair in the 1960s. And she's been pretty excited to go see not all the museums but just the things New York is known for: Tiffany's, Bloomingdale's, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, etc. So I wasn't worried about her. But my parents work really really hard . . . they are two giant stressballs all the time because they work 7 days a week virtually all the time, and 10 hour days . . . although with their jobs (farmer and politician) you can't really define how many hours they work. I guess that's the thing - they don't have jobs, they have lifestyles. They live and breathe their work. Sure some people say that about people who work in office jobs, and I do not for a second intented to belittle what such professionals do or the effort they put in. But it's still different . . . a farmer never leaves his job, he lives there *literally* not just figuratively. That's not necessarily a bad thing. My Dad loves what he does, even though he doesn't love all the stress or the lack of money. But it's the only way he's ever lived his life. He grew up waking up in the wee hours of the morning to milk the cows before he went to school. And Mom, well, the whole State Representative thing is a relatively recent turn of events (sure she's in her 3rd year but wehn you consider that she is 55 years old, that's recent.) But it's a lifestyle too., a job that never goes away, that while it may technically have an "office" is really a job that happens everywhere she goes, be it the supermarket or the hog market.

So I guess knowing how hard they work, and knowing how stressed they are most of the time, I just really want this vacation to actually be a vacation for them. So it makes me feel good that I've given them something to look forward to.