My oh my, it’s been quite some time since we’ve dived into this:

For the uninitiated, this is a box of mementos that I’ve been dragging around for years. Some time ago, I decided it was time to get rid of the items. So in clusters of five, I remove them and wallow in one last swirl of nostalgia before discarding them forever.

This is hardly the last Ani Difranco ticket you’ll see. One of my marital obligations involves seeing the righteous babe nearly every time she buses into our proximity. This ticket gained our entrance to the House of Blues located on Disney grounds, an unholy combination of Dan Aykroyd’s cutesified bastardization of the sort of bluesy juke joints he undoubtedly loves (at least in theory) and the company that never met a corner of entertainment it couldn’t coopt or commidify. Unfortunately, Difranco was operating with a similar view that evening, offering snide asides about the place she was playing and generally delivering the most lackluster performance I’ve ever seen her give.

This was a play in a small theater in Madison. We attended because my cousin was appearing in the play. When we were kids, we both talked about how much fun it would be to be actors. My introversion swamped out those aspirations, but, to his great credit, he actually pursued it, appearing in several community productions.

More horrors from Mickeytown. The entertainment titans operating the theme parks there make great efforts to squeeze every last dime out of the tourists who flood into town. So instead of venturing into town to patronize small, locally owned and operated businesses, the out-of-towners can simply go to a different corner of park property and get overpriced drinks and treacherously unhealthy plates of food at fabricated nightclubs and garish theme restaurants. As the tone of the previous sentence indicates, this wasn’t an especially enticing destination for us. These passes come from a night when we were lured down there for a workplace holiday function. We took advantage of this to briefly–very briefly–explore this slice or Orlando nightlife, effectively confirming that this was not the place for us.

April 15, 2001 was less than two weeks after Miller Park hosted its first regular season major league baseball game and almost exactly six weeks before we loaded up a gigantic truck with our belongings and changed our place of residence from Wisconsin to Florida. Until I saw this ticket, I didn’t even remember we’d done this. I thought the only game we saw at Miller Park before moving was a preseason game that served as a sort of preview of the new stadium. Maybe we didn’t see that, and I’m thinking of this. Actually, as I write this, I do remember the game included a bad Barry Bonds error in left field that helped the Brewers win the game, much to the delight of the assembled fans. This is back when they still made a big ceremony of closing the roof after every game.

And that 2000 date tells me that this ticket is from the last Chicago International Film Festival we attended before moving south. This is the debut feature from David Gordon Green, eight years before he jumped onto the Judd Apatow comedy train with Pineapple Express. I was convinced that the cinematography by Tim Orr could earn an out-of-left-field Oscar nomination that year, it was that striking. Green was there for a Q-and-A session after the film, and looked as uncomfortable as could be answering questions in front of a crowded theater.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)