Potted Potter With the Girls

Natalie and I had the extreme pleasure of hanging out with my sisters Melissa and Cynthia and their daughters Emily and Aly this past Tuesday night. We purposely drove into Houston early enough so we could go out to dinner and then the live show Potted Potter at the Wortham Center.

First we went out to dinner at the Amazon Grill. The girls all had the popcorn chicken, which includes cotton candy. Aly doesn't like cotton candy, but Emily and Natalie had some. (Cover your eyes, Papa! Patrick doesn't like even the idea of cotton candy and would prefer if his children never had the stuff.)

I'm not sure what the girls are doing in this picture, but since they would not pose for a picture, I hurriedly took this one. Natalie couldn't remember exactly what they were doing either, but something about pointing fingers at each other. As I told her, that is blaming each other for things is something good cousins/sisters do, and she agreed. They have so much fun together and Natalie really misses her cousins when she can't be with them.

We got to the theater early, so we hung out in their lobby. They had food set up there so people can eat there if they want to. The girls shared some chocolate cake and Melissa and I had some Starbucks coffee. I am definitely not a coffee person. I tried the iced latte, but I prefer my sweet, creamy, and cold Starbucks frappucino or even better, my sweet, creamy, and cold coffee ice cream!

They also had this photo-booth type of set-up. I was glad that we got there early, because the line got very long later. We only had to wait for one group before us. The set-up was obviously a one-size-fits-all type of set-up and meant to accomodate much taller people! They didn't even get the whole "Potted Potter" sign that I held up in the picture. I did crop this one to center everyone better, because Aly had a whole bunch of space to her left. There was also an included line of advertisers at the bottom, but I cropped that out also. The girls really didn't want their pictures taken, so this was a wonderful opportunity to get a photo of all of us together on our Girls' Night out.

The girls have always been big Harry Potter fans. There was this chalkboard set up to one side with the four houses of Hogwarts written across the top. We presumed this was for people to mark which house they "belonged" to or which house was their favorite. Natalie and her cousins were adding tally marks underneath "Ravenclaw" because the smart people are in Ravenclaw. Cynthia said that Aly took a test on the Pottermore website and she was "sorted" into Gryffindor house. Apparently Aly didn't like that, although it's not so bad since Gryffindor house has the "brave" people.

Finally, Cynthia managed to snag a picture of at least Aly and Emily in front of the Potted Potter sign. I really wish the girls allowed more pictures of themselves. I really want to remember them at this age!

The show itself was basically the seven Harry Potter books condensed into "seventy hilarious minutes". There were only two actors in the show and they used a variety of simple props and costumes to convey the story. They even had a "live" Quidditch game where they had two young volunteers from the audience represent seekers from the two teams, Gryffindor and Slytherin. I found it interesting that those two kids volunteered, because they did not seem that interested in actually participating. The seeker's job in the game of Quidditch is to catch the Golden Snitch, and when the Golden Snitch was on stage, the two volunteers barely moved from the spots where they were standing to catch him! The audience participation part was the most fun. They threw a beach ball into the audience and each team was supposed to get the ball through the other side's goal.

They mixed content from the books with modern as well as classic pop culture references (like the "I Will Survive" song changed up to fit Voldemort's struggle to survive in the books. Although the ad says that you don't have to know anything about the books to enjoy yourself, knowing the books would increase your enjoyment of the show more. I wasn't sure what to expect from the show when I bought the tickets, but we all really enjoyed ourselves. We really enjoyed being with each other more than anything else. We'll have to do another Girls' Night out the next time we see each other!