ISO and the Cheesecake Factory

Saturday evening, Carl and I went to the Hilbert Circle Theatre to hear the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. It had been a while since I had been there and Carl had never been. The orchestra performed a couple Aaron Copeland pieces, a world premiere of a Symphony, Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (one of my favorite musicals, by the way), and George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The symphony was composed by Gabriela Lena Frank, who is Hispanic and talked to lots of Hispanic immigrants to Indianapolis to get ideas to compose this symphony. It was really good. I liked how she spoke and explained the different Testimonios of the symphony, called Peregrinos, which is Spanish for Pilgrims, before the orchestra performed it. Of course, my favorite part of the whole performance was Rhapsody in Blue...I LOVE it. The piano soloist was Gabriela Montero, who did an amazing job. She came back on stage to do an encore, which was even more amazing. She asked for someone in the audience to sing a theme or melody line to her, which she would take and improvise. A lady in the balcony started singing "Somewhere over the rainbow..." which Montero took and did an awesome job. She just took that little theme and played for almost 5 minutes or more, doing all kinds of stuff on the piano. I can't explain it very well, but it was awesome. I just sat there in awe, wishing I could do that.
After the performance, we went to Monument Circle (we couldn't be so close and NOT stop by our special spot), but we didn't stay very long. It was really windy and cold. We were the only ones on the Monument. A lot different than it was the night Carl proposed... I took a picture of us

and then we went to get a hot chocolate at Starbucks.
Then we headed to The Cheesecake Factory. We were supposed to go there on Valentine's Day, but they had a minimum three hour wait. So we saved it until Saturday. We shared an appetizer (the Southern Fried Chicken Sliders) and we each had a slice of cheesecake. Carl had the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough cheesecake and I had the Cherry cheesecake. We only ate half of our slices and took the other halves home with us. We had a wonderful evening. It was like having a second Valentine's Day date.
I told Carl that he has to take me to hear the ISO every weekend. While we were there, I did not have a headache at all. It is just so relaxing...