Easter Celebrations 2022, Part I: Mesa Easter Pageant

The Easter Pageant at the Mesa temple was back on this year. Yay! I only remember going to it once when Elisa was a little baby. I don't remember why we haven't been since, other than moving to Texas and Covid. We went on a Wednesday, which was April 13th. I assumed we were going but forgot to tell Erik that I wanted to go. So I sprang it on him after I was finished with lessons that we were going then. Haha. He went along with it. On the way we stopped at Wendy's and this time we made sure to check that all of our order was in the bag! 

Erik dropped us off and found a parking spot some ways off. There were so, so, SO many people there. Thousands. We were about 15-20 minutes early and even then, there was no hope of us getting a seat on the lawn. I did manage to find a seat front and center, though about a quarter of a mile away. I say "seat" but what I was sitting on was basically a big planter. It was raised which was nice, but it wasn't comfortable by any means. But, it was better than sitting on the itchy grass and trying to see the show through a bunch of bodies. I did think ahead enough to bring the binoculars, but unfortunately both pairs were messed up but they were better than nothing. I really enjoyed the performance. It was quite the show, and I think the kids enjoyed it too. I don't remember the pageant employing so much fancy technology, but it was really neat to see all the special effects. We were trying to decide at first if the actors were actually singing (we were so far away), but we decided that they were lip syncing to a soundtrack. There's just no way they can sing that well for the entire show. I believe this pageant had a cast of around 300 people! It was quite the production. I thought the angels on the roof were pretty cool.

I was irritated that our church (or stake, at least) does pretty much nothing for Easter except stake conference which has nothing to do with Easter. I can't understand what would possess them to decide to have stake conference on Easter Sunday when there are lots of other Sundays available--they have stake conference every single year on Easter Sunday. How dumb. In a way, this pageant made up for that.

Here are the pictures I got of the pageant, you can see how far away we were and how many people there were!