Do you speak Cherry Creek?

We live pretty close the Cherry Creek North Shopping District. It’s amazing how different the neighborhoods are, given the proximity… but Cherry Creek is ultramodern, expensive and trendy… while our neighborhood still maintains some old world charm. Much of that is probably because our neighborhood strictly monitors new construction and one must follow guidelines to keep the houses true to their original style.

Not that I dislike Cherry Creek. It’s wonderful to have all those restaurants and shops in walking distance and we do go down there often. However, we must have never really paid attention to the “scene” all that much. At least on Friday nights.

Jeff and Danielle were kind enough to baby-sit for us last night so Bryan and I could have a date. A real date, dinner and a movie! (Oh, as a side note, when Jeff and Danielle have kids – they have a shitload of babysitting credits with us.)

So, we decided to try out the new and swank restaurant North. Of course, on a Friday night we were lucky that they were able to squeeze us in and they only had a patio table available. Fine by us, the weather has cooled off recently and the big open air of the restaurant inside made it so freaking loud – we were very happy with our little patio table. The food was fantastic and the people watching… well, let’s just say that Bryan and I rarely have the opportunity to sit in Cherry Creek and just watch the masses go by.

There were the plastic surgery addicts, the ultra-hip gay couples, the post-work crew sniffing each other out for weekend hook-ups, the rich teens cruising in their parents BMW for the evening, the girls-night-out gang of girlfriends (very sparkly), the uber-rich families-of-4 with kids in clothing that cost about the same as my mortgage payment, the women who must have moved here from Texas with their layers of makeup and huge-ass hair, the kooky cool old couple with their funky green and purple glasses, the rich dude in a 3-piece suit and his 1/3 of his age trophy wife… and so on and so on. And us.

The good thing about Cherry Creek is, even with all this pretentiousness floating around, most people still are very nice. Some holds for the wait staff at most of the restaurants. So, we had a fantastic meal – although maybe our eyebrows were a bit tired at the end of it from all the silent gesturing to each other to check THAT out.

After dinner, we headed to the artsy theater in another nearby neighborhood to see “A Scanner Darkly.” I knew going in that the film was about drugs and done in a funky animated style. That’s it. I came out thinking it was a fantastic film that had great acting (especially Robert Downey Jr. – can you get an Oscar nomination when the character is a hand-drawn caricature of your performance?)… and the incredible effects (it was a really cool mix of seeing the actor’s performance through the drawing style but then being able to add visuals to enhance the drug experience they were going through)… overall, we both thought it was a great movie. Big thumbs up. If any of the above sounds appealing, go see it.

The theater itself is a startling contrast to Cherry Creek… small, dumpey and homey feeling. I mean, the theater screen is literally like 1/6th the size of the screen I saw Superman Returns on. It was a very.. well.. cute way to end the evening!

We need to plan more date nights.

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