Prior to watching the Super Bowl, it was necessary that I perform a pennance in advance by way of a little family entertainment. So it was off with wife and three-year-old in tow to a performance of Dora the Explorer Live!

For those not familiar, Dora the Explorer is a show aimed more or less at the Sesame Street crowd - slow paced, simple animation, healthy doses of Spanish thrown in for a good multi-culti flavor. Very popular with the pre-school set.

Fortunately, the place (the Wang Center) isn't very big, so even though we were most of the way back, the view was...OK. It started well enough, the characters started coming out on stage and doing their thing...whereupon it sinks in to my girl, who gets scared nearly to death when Chuck E. Cheese walks in the room, that those are real people up there on the stage which causes her, for reasons only known to certain three-year-olds, to shake, scream and demand to be taken home.

Being the considerate parent I am, I took the girl out to the back of the hall where we could look in from outside through a glass window while I tried to get her to relax and go back in to our seats. Any move back to the entrance of the hall caused the fits to start up again, so we just watched through to the intermission from the back and I'm thinking, "Oh great, 90 bucks for tickets, 15 bucks to park, 12 bucks for a friggin' Dora lightbulb on a stick thing..." But all was not lost. I was able to get her into it from a distance, and we were able to take our seats for the second "act."

And what a show it was. :rolleyes: Message to the Producers: Would it have killed you to put something in for the dads? You know, you go to the circus and there are some skimpy tu-tu's, same with the various ice shows, even Disney animates some cute heroines - that Snow White is alright. But this thing? Nada, zilch, nothing. I mean, I don't need the Lingerie Bowl, but come on, gimme something here. Throw me a bone. Dora looked like the person who played her was closer to forty than four, even the buttlerfly had a big ole' butt. And lest you think they might have thrown some innuendo into the relationship between Dora and her monkey companion "Boots," well all I can say is take a look at the pictures. Now, maybe if Dora had been a "Donnie" or a "Dick" it might have been different, but let me assure you, in this case, there was nothing there. Even the audience was MILFless!

So imagine me there in the first half, screaming kid, fighting off my wife who wanted to force the girl to go back in in spite of the screaming to prove some sort of point, and nothing to show for it. Oh, and the music? Let's see, the first number was exceptional. Lemme see, how did it go? Something like, "My teddy bear! Where is my teddy bear? I lost my teddy bear!!!" Say, isn't that a Rogers and Hammerstein number? Not.

Seriously, couldn't they have spent a few more minutes coming up with some catchy music to wedge in between the computerized beeps and boops from the TV show? I'll give them this, the finale was a rompin' production number that really had the kids going nuts. Why, oh why couldn't they have put a few more of those in there?

Ah well, my daughter did have a good time with it by the end, and an impression was made, unfortunately it's not the kind of thing you can go to again now that she's warmed up to it.

Well, anyway, we had a nice lunch and then a long nap and then an evening of adult (semi) entertainment which made it all worthwhile!