Pancakes Just Got Flipped. Here's Why It Matters.

Flip-flopping

Even without Katie’s help we still managed to conjure up a decent batch of pancakes this year, before settling down with Catherine and AJ to watch the New Hampshire primary. This included the first of what looks likely to be a long-running tradition of Donald Trump victory speeches, notable for their free-wheeling lack of structure or syntax, spontaneous walk-on parts for audience members, and helpful choruses of “USA!” at random intervals which serve as a useful reminder of the country you’re in. I am seriously starting to weigh up, in the still-unlikely event of a Trump presidency, the wisdom of an early getaway versus the historical opportunity to witness such a thing first-hand.

One place where Trump is likely to do well is Byhalia, Mississippi – but true to my bourgeois roots, I’m linking to an excellent play of the same name which we saw that weekend instead. After a brief affair with an African-American man, a newly-married white woman gives birth to a mixed-race child, and her husband must come to terms with the fact that her son is ‘not his’. The couple’s relationship is at the core of the play, and the storytelling perfectly balances this focus with the other obvious issues raised. Everything just came together really well, and it’s now one of my favourite things I’ve seen in Chicago.

Note the appropriate t-shirt

Another of my favourite Chicago sights is the sun, which made a rare appearance last weekend to coincide with Randi’s mum visiting. We went to see Van Gogh’s Bedrooms at the Art Institute, which means I’ve finally spent a respectable amount of time there. Good old Vincent painted three versions of the same famous painting, y’see, and so the gallery has licence to gather them all together and put on a glorified game of spot-the-difference. (We also very neatly timed our Doctor Who watching so Randi finally saw ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ just beforehand.) That night Jason took us to eat very fulsomely at Avec – tapas for people with appetites – and we were suitably stuffed and happy.

I rounded off the weekend by going to Grace’s ATC Fundraiser in Andersonville. It’s the kind of ‘fundraiser’ where all you have to do is order drinks from a bar, but I turned up so late I was close to failing at even this, so I quickly bought a few raffle tickets to even things out. Lo and behold, I promptly won tickets worth much more than my solitary contributory cocktail. Everyone else left soon afterwards – either in protest at my Machiavellian tactics or because they’d been diligently drinking for hours – and I was left to celebrate my success with two affable drunk men at the bar. Sadly I can’t remember their names, or I’d be tempted to track them down to continue our increasingly surreal arguments about marriage, but maybe I should just hang out in more bars in Andersonville.

Tangent: last night I performed the deceptively-productive (but actually entirely time-wasting) task of cleaning out my blog subscriptions, and I was made quite nostalgic and sad by all the voices who have gone silent. Especially those whose last post, written sometime around the George W Bush era, was an earnest promise to blog more. I miss you all.

Explanation: today’s title is a tribute to the terrible headlines at Vox, an otherwise fine news source to which I have grown increasingly addicted. And don’t even get me started on their podcast, The Weeds… that moment when someone else at work starts quoting lines from a political policy podcast is confirmation, if more were needed, of the lovely bubble in which I live.

Katie Sharing, Beth Dubowe-Lawrence, Randi Lawrence liked this post.