Last Friday my wife asked me out on a date. The venue of choice? Urban Pie. We both love live music and there was a familiar gentleman by the name of Mike Staebell playing.

Sitting outside, eating pizza and drinking cocktails with live music? Sign me up!

We decided to get a Crab Rangoon Pizza and a Greek Salad and they did not disappoint. We shared our meals with one another so we had a balanced dinner. Jill’s beverage of choice on this crisp August evening was Singlespeed’s Gracie Gose. I had grown weary of beer, for some unknown reason to myself, and decided to have some cocktails instead. I mostly drank Royal Crown with some ginger flavored water but later switched to Crown and water.

We sat out on the patio for about 4 hours listening to great covers of some of our favorite songs. Part of the set included a gal that had never sang in front of an audience before. She was super green and used her phone instead of memorizing the lyrics, but she sang like an angel. It was a little tough to watch her struggle to try and play the guitar and swipe her phone to see the next chorus, but like I told some others that were critiquing her performance, you gotta start somewhere. I admired her bravery and the crowd did as well as they gave her generous applause each time she finished a song.

Mike was a whole other kind of performer. He was so comfortable up there he couldn’t help but have fun and his good mood was infectious. He was very talented and had cool renditions of songs but my favorite part of his set was when he would joke around or ask the crowd to take a drink with him while yelling “CHEERS!”.

We had a great evening with some great entertainment and some really good food. Another successful date night.