The rain on the drive up to Alexandria kinda sucked on Friday afternoon, but even with the crappy traffic and panicky drivers, Mary and I still made the trip from Richmond in right around two hours, which put us at the Birchmere box office around five-thirty, plenty of time to pick up our tickets, purchase our matching Code Monkey t-shirts, deposit said shirts back in the car, and hang around for a few mintues before they opened up the doors to the music hall.

We managed to grab ourselves a nice table, ordered dinner, watched people, and talked a bit with the folks around us; the Jonathan Coulton crowd are “my people”, plugged-in internet nerds, many with degrees in information technology, and encyclopædic knowledge of Monty Python and fantasy role playing games. We had nice dinnertime conversation with the guys next to us about music, Vegas, Doctor Who, and Gary Gygax, who passed away last week. Thankfully, my eldest child fits well with this crowd, and managed to both hold her own and impress the hell out of the rest of the geeks in the room.

After dinner (including the brownie ice cream sundae Mary talked me into buying, which was good, but not $7.95 good), the show commenced to begin (and yes, wife of mine, this redundancy is conscious); with opening acts Paul and Storm doing their particular brand of musical comedy. A good time was had by all, with lots of snack cakes, audience participation, and a great song tribute to the inventor of the chicken nugget, featuring Coulton on harmony vocals.

After a brief pee break, Coulton came on, knocking out a solid 90+ minute set including all the “hits”, much with Paul and Storm handling backup vocal duties. All the highlights were there (well, except Mr. Fancy Pants), and Mary sang along with just about all of them, including her favorite, Code Monkey, and a great encore cover of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”, ending with a deluge of plush animals pelting the stage (it’s kind of a thing…like the Kraft Mac and Cheese at old BNL shows…). It’s pretty safe to say we all had a great time.

The ride home was a little better than the ride back, as the rain had let up. Mary slept just about the whole way, and we crawled back into our humble abode around one am, slept late, and spent the rest of the weekend doing basic things, dodging high winds on Saturday, and grumbling most of Sunday about daylight savings time.