The Downtown Diner

Like many managers in the IT industry, I don't like surprises. Because surprises are almost never good, are they? But yesterday morning when I came in to the office I had a good surprise waiting for me. When I walked into my office I saw an envelope sitting on top of my keyboard. It was a special delivery from one of our vendors, with two concert tickets to the China Philharmonic Orchestra concert. How nice! Then I checked the date - they were for that night at 7:30! I quickly called my husband and told him I had two tickets for a concert that night. He said exactly what I expected: "You want to take Audrey?"

I wasn't sure how Audrey, who is seven, would do in the 1-1/2 hour concert but I figured if she was bored we could leave during the intermission and that would be no big loss since the tickets were free to me. But she amazed me. She sat quietly through the first song and at the end, she clapped with such genuine enthusiasm that I knew she really was enjoying it. She turned to me with a huge grin on her face and said, "It's great music!" Things only got better when the soprano came out on stage wearing a flaming red ball gown with many sparkly rhinestones. Audrey was her biggest fan.

At the intermission I gave her the chance to escape but she wouldn't hear of it. She wanted to stay through the entire concert.

The concert was held at a concert hall inside the Forbidden City. We walked out afterwards and found ourselves directly in front of Tiananmen Square. It was illuminated, the moon was bright, and the weather was not too cold, above freezing at least. Audrey and I decided to walk around Tiananmen for a while and enjoy the fact that she and I were in such a beautiful place at such a beautiful time.

My husband and I are the types who like good music but at age seven, we wouldn't have sat still through the concert the way our daughter did. I went home and told him that this apple is apparently falling very far from the tree and we both agreed that's a good thing.