ACT’s Christmas Carol

We often catch The Nutcracker during the holidays, but this year we decided to try something different, so we got tickets to the American Conservatory Theater’s performance of A Christmas Carol. The show was enjoyable, although I have to confess that my reference for any Christmas Carol performance is still Mickey’s Christmas Carol (likely due to some combination of it being the first one I saw and it also being the variation I’ve seen most often). Who doesn’t enjoy Goofy as Jacob Marley?

Getting to the theater, however, was a pain. Public transit in the Bay Area just kind of sucks; it never seems to run at the right times or to/from the right places, and it’s usually both faster and cheaper to drive. Plus if you’re dressed up a bit (which we were, even though we were catching a matinee performance) you don’t want to have to stand around outside in winter waiting for a train. So we opted to drive, and thought an hour was plenty of extra time to alot to find parking. Unfortunately we failed to reckon with how crowded the Union Square area would be on the weekend before Christmas; it took us almost 40 minutes to find a garage that had open parking spots. So lesson learned: avoid driving to holiday performances in SF right before Christmas.