IHSAA Football Week 9

Tonight was the last Friday of the IHSAA football regular season. The playoffs start, I think, next week.

City High played at CR Prairie (the Little Hawks won, 41-14) and West Branch played at North Cedar (after trailing 21-0 at halftime, West Branch climbed back into the game and won 28-21), so there were no local games I was interested in seeing. I could have watched West get run over by Cedar Falls, 34-16, or Regina steamroll West Liberty, 41-0, but fuck that. It’s my birthday, so I decided to do something special.

Tonight I took my parents and sister downtown for dinner at Short’s (The Airliner was packed) and then saw the Max Weinberg Big Band at The Englert.

Big band is not my thing, but I’ll listen to it. And there was no way I would pass up the opportunity to see Max Weinberg when he was in town.

It was an amazing show. The band rocked Englert with big band arrangements from the likes of Count Basie, The Beatles, and TV theme songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s; Weinberg introduced each song or set with a little story and history of each. I was not only awed by his drum playing skills but also by the combined talent of his orchestra. At the end they played “Born to Run” in homage of Weinberg’s time with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band. By far the best part of the night was when two tenor saxophonists “battled” as the rest of the band backed them with a rousing rhythm. If you have the chance to see the band, I highly recommend it.

Another reason I decided on the Max Weinberg concert was to see the “newly” renovated Englert. It has been renovated and reopened for years, but I had not been inside since it was a movie theater. The last time I was at the Englert was the summer of 1998; I saw Eddie Murphy’s bastardization of Doctor Doolittle with a few friends. Since then it was closed by Central States, bought by a bar owner, bought by the City of Iowa City, and renovated and bought by a group of citizens. It looked beautiful. I remember well how it looked before, and was amazed it had once been split in two. As a kid, the movie theaters seemed huge, but I realize now they were tiny.

Though I love what it is now, the old Englert has a special place in my heart. The movies I remember seeing there were Ghostbusters 2, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Twister, Michael (that shitty John Travolta movie), Tomorrow Never Dies, Titanic, The X-Files Movie, Godzilla, and, unfortunately, Doctor Doolittle.