Saturday night's all right for Elton :)

Stage setup before the concert began.  Elton's piano is in the very lower left-hand corner.
It moved around the stage too!  

I just got back from spending 11 days with my parents (a rare solo trip without dh -- he vows I am never going away that long without him again, lol). I arrived on Friday, October 4th -- and the next day (Saturday, October 5th), my sister (who had this week off work & also spent it at at Mom & Dad's) & I headed back into the city to see Elton John in concert on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour -- which he says will be his last. My sister has seen him twice before (including once with my mother!!) but I'd never been, and SIL & I were unable to snag a pair of tickets to his Toronto shows later this month. My sister & I went to see Paul McCartney together at the same venue last year, and the chance to see Elton -- another of the musical icons of our youth -- on his farewell tour, still at the top of his game (at age 72!), was just too good to pass up.  Our tickets ($250 each) were just above where we'd been for Paul McCartney.

It was worth the trip and every single penny.  :)  He played for three solid hours -- most of the songs you'd expect to hear and a few you might not have (set list here) -- and changed outfits three times.  :)  (Kind of reminded me of when my mother, grandmother, great-aunt & I went to see Liberace back in the early 1970s, lol.)  The platform his grand piano sat on actually moved around the stage!! so we got a slightly better look at him than we thought we would!  ;)  His band was absolutely fabulous too (some of them have been with him for 40-50 years!), and I had almost as much fun watching his percussionist, Ray Cooper, as I did watching him.

My sister said you never leave until he's played "Your Song" -- which is his traditional last song (also probably my favourite of his, and a runner-up for the first dance song at our wedding). But this time he went from that into "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," which is the theme of the tour & appropriate when you listen to the lyrics. He said 10 years ago he never would have thought he would stop touring -- but that was before he had a family (two young boys), and he wants to spend whatever time he has left with them, watching them grow up. (Everyone applauded at that.) At the end of the last song, he got into this hydraulic lift thing & it went up the side of the screen as he waved, and then a little door opened and he disappeared through it, lol. When we came in at the beginning, the big screen had the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" cover picture on it... I didn't notice at the end as we were leaving, but my sister said she saw it came to life.... the Elton figure turned and smiled and then walked off down the yellow brick road & disappeared!  Cool. :)

Before the concert began, we met up with an old friend -- the cousin of our best friends from growing up -- as well as her husband & one of her adult sons. Haven't seen her in years & years, but she & I reconnected on Facebook a while back, and when we realized we'd both be at the concert, we arranged to meet up before the show started and chat for a while. Bonus!

You can read the local newspaper's review of Friday night's concert here.

I meant to do a post about the concert for #MicroblogMondays LAST week, but (as often happens when I'm visiting my parents) my time is not my own & the days pass far too quickly when I'm there. More adventures from my trip to come in a future post (and there WERE adventures!) -- also, reviews of all the books I read!

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here. 

Confetti rained down on the audience during "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting,"
the final number of the concert (before the encore). Really cool to see!
(I got some video footage of it too.)