The Hill Is Alive With The High School Musical

Tonight we watched the Disney Movie "High School Musical" for the second time in about as many weeks. R has two students who are practicing a song from the movie, so they loaned her a copy of the film so that she could see the original number. It was pretty good for a TV movie. It was pretty good for a regular movie, really.

Apparently, it has been wildly popular for a year already. Who knew? I think it's quite well done. The dialogue was genuinely funny, and the scenes were filled with quirky props and extras. It was also nice that the "high school kids" were played by people who could actually pass for teenagers.

So, tonight was the second time we watched it. The first time was last month, when R's mom and sister were here. During their visit we did plenty of other things, including ANOTHER tour of Parliament Hill. Actually, we only toured one of the buildings, not the whole hill, because it was way too cold to do anything else. We made a beeline for the doors, hardly looking right or left. This snapshot was taken on our way back to the car. The girls were quite excited when I found that I had filled the memory card (because I still hadn't deleted photos dating back to October), and they had to stand in the cold while I deleted a few old pictures to make space. R was probably ok, since she was wearing her scarf like a ninja / thief.

We tried counting, but I really have no idea how many times we've done the Parliamentary Tour. I think we could actually put on a decent tour ourselves by now, since we could combine all the little tips and facts that we've heard during our 15 or more visits to the Hill. One of the best visits was last summer, when my second-cousin S was in town on a Parliamentary internship. He had privileged access to all the buildings and he took us on a special tour through all the different floors of the Centre Block, followed by dinner in the Parliamentary Restaurant -- a posh place where we saw and shook hands with Bill Graham, then the Leader of the Opposition.

The restaurant was so posh, in fact, that men are supposed to wear jackets. We did not realize this, so cousin S and I arrived wearing ties, but no jackets. The maître d' offered us blazers off of a coat rack near the door. They were the sort that linger on the racks at Value Village without any interested buyers. I had an oversized woolen number with gold buttons, while S proudly sported this salmon-coloured beauty. Fortunately, you don't have to wear the jackets at your table. We shed them fairly quickly. The maître d' offered to let us keep the jackets, but we couldn't tell if he was kidding, so we left them for the next needy guests.

That was probably the coolest trip to Parliament we've ever had. This most recent trip probably ranks as the coldest.

What a horrible, horrible play on words. High School Musical was much better written than that, I promise.

Sadly, the film had no salmon-coloured sport jackets. Perhaps in the sequel.