Brilliant!

That really sums up the Regina Spektor concert at Sokol Auditorium, opened by Only Son (if you'd like to see one of the songs they performed together during the encore, watch the "Hotel Song" video from an earlier show in Chicago).

My sister, Marcy, has a bunch of pictures of the concert up on Flickr. If you aren't too busy, I like her picture of our kitten Simon, the predator, on her third page of pictures (the sphinxy one is fun too).

But back to the concert, it really was everything I had hoped that it would be. The Steinway was grand, literally and figuratively, Regina was really magnificent, and was a trooper too, fighting off sickness (a fight she was beginning to lose by the time the encore came), and Jack/Only Son had a very fun open, what with his iPodologue and all (that would be when he had a conversation with his iPod).

The last song of the evening was Samson. This was one of her songs that I greatly anticipated. When I heard it at the show, I thought about the burden Delilah had lifted from her Hebrew hero. I know my own experience pales in comparison, but I think I felt similarly to him when I decided it was more important to graduate from Union than it was to graduate from the Honors Program at Union. It was a tremendous relief to eliminate the academic burden I'd probably carried with me since third grade.