Last night we attended Star Wars in Concert here in Vancouver. It was most excellent! There were a few people dressed in costume (not me or Eileen though) and the general atmosphere was energetic, sort of like seeing the original movie in the theatre many, many years ago. I originally thought the event would be showing the entire first movie, but later learned it was a composite of many clips from all six films.

I have no idea how it worked out so well but through the miracle of online ticket purchasing combined with some amazing luck we scored front row seats on the floor, right in front of the stage. If I’d wanted to, I could have jumped out of my seat and easily leapt on stage. I could have tackled C3PO (Anthony Daniels) if I’d wanted to. Fortunately I resisted this urge and therefore am not writing this from jail.

The event itself was really great, the music was wonderful and we were close enough to watch the individual performances of each member of the orchestra. The only somewhat disappointing part of the evening was having to sit through so many clips from the most recent movies (episodes 1, 2, 3). It really is painful to watch the stilted dialogue and terrible acting. There were plenty of scenes from the “good” films too, especially lots from episode 4.

Of course the famous cantina scene played, with the live orchestra giving a great performance. Even though the film clip was from the 1997 redone version, we all knew Han shot first.

Eileen and I went to the Canucks seat selection session last night to pick new seats for next season. The new season won’t start until October but we are still looking forward to it!

The seat selection process is both thrilling and depressing – GM Place has something like 18,800 seats for each game (sold out every night) and yet there are really only a handful of seats available when we get the opportunity to pick. We could have kept our same seats from last year, but we were looking for something a little better: less behind the goalie and more around the side towards the blue line. We also were interested to get closer to the front row.

We lucked out this year, there were a few seats that met our “upgrade” requirements: about half-way between the goal line and the blue line, and row 3. The picture here shows the view of the defensive zone net from our seat. Nice!

Its going to be a long summer waiting for the season to start!

The Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup tonight, marking the end of another hockey season. I’m disappointed the series didn’t go the full seven games, but I think the team with more skill won. The Flyers gave it the good fight but in the end they couldn’t put up enough of a fight to delay the eventual outcome. The ‘hawks didn’t have great goal tending, but they did have a pretty good top line and a really deep pool of talent and toughness to draw upon. And despite having Marion Hossa (the unlucky charm for teams of the last two years) they managed to pull out a convincing win. It will be interesting to see if this team is a one-time-only winner (like the Lightening, the Hurricanes, the Ducks) or if they can continue to be a dominant force like the Penguins and Wings have been.

Already looking forward to next season where we will be cheering for the Canucks again.