While we were having dinner last night at the Booth Hotel in downtown Independence (the hotel gets a mention in Picnic), a line of powerful thunderstorms swept through town, flooding the street in front of the hotel, and briefly sending us looking for the shelter when the tornado warning sirens went off. However, we missed the really bad weather to the south of us in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

The lights flickered once or twice, but soon the storms passed — “Look, there’s a dead witch under the house and everything’s in color!” — and the show went on.