Last night, Maria and I went to see the story of plucky teens who have their futures ahead of them and tell their story through song and dance.

No, not “High School Musical 3,” although we will go see that soon enough. We took in a local theater group’s production of “Grease.”

This served as our date to celebrate our 13th anniversary, which took place a couple of weeks ago. We wanted to see this show so had no problem holding off our special night out. “Grease” is special for us because we watched it together on TV the night we started dating.

I had never seen the stage production before. I knew it would differ from the movie, but was amazed at how many pieces of dialogue were exactly the same as the film. I didn’t find the plot as easy to follow as the movie, but this was mainly a group of high school kids so some of that could have been in the level of acting.

I’m not trying to bash them because they did a good job. The singing was wonderful, and they had incredible energy. I could nitpick a million things, but will instead remember the energy of the girl playing Pattie Simcox, the entertaining performance of the guy playing Kenickie in his first-ever stage show, and the delicious meanness in the performance of Rizzo.

You could see how much fun they had performing as the danced up and down the aisles during the final song. This marked the third local theater production we have seen in the past few months, and I think we’ll continue to go to these kinds of shows. Sure, we could go an hour down the road to Baltimore to see professional productions – and we still might on occasion – but there’s something special about seeing a show just a few blocks from your house performed by teenagers who really want to make you smile.