The 606 (with guests)
A smorgasbord of things to post about:
- Improv comedy featuring fellow megachurch attendee Kannan in Fucked Up Family Reunion. Sadly my family isn’t nearly interesting enough to qualify, but another audience member stepped up to the plate to provide material.
- Take the Armenian genocide, mix with a dysfunctional marriage and you get Beast on the Moon – an unsurprisingly intense play about two survivors living in 1920s Milwaukee. Bonus theatre points: the playwright turned out to be sitting behind us.
- Hayao Miyazaki’s swansong, The Wind Rises, was first released in 2013 but Katie tipped me off to a showing and I was delighted to catch it in the cinema. Like his other films that I’ve seen, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, the imagination and wandering narrative is quite different to most Hollywood films, and the film’s thoughtful and nuanced approach to Japanese engineering during WW2 is probably evidence that ‘losing’ countries make better art. Plus the short, angry boss character is quite wonderful.
- After another term of SPARK mentoring, I attended another ‘Discovery Night’ where students in the programme present their projects to classmates and parents. Huge thanks to Katie for stepping in midway through to mentor!
- At Simon’s suggestion, Randi and I caught the Chicago leg of Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox tour – vintage covers of Taylor Swift, One Direction, Magic! and more. It was a lot of fun, even from the nosebleeds.
- We also saw Ex Machina (along with Kevin and Nolan) which was creepy, wonderful, and left me deeply disturbed and distrusting of everyone around me in case they were actually vengeful robots with AI.
- And finally, today was 06/06/2015 – or, in American dating formatting, 06/06/2015. Which was nice, because (a) it doesn’t make my new t-shirt look stupid, and (b) it was also the opening day of Chicago’s new elevated ‘Bloomingdale Trail’ or ‘The 606‘. Basically, it’s like New York’s High Line, but in Chicago, and about double the length at 3 miles (so there). Opening day was fortuitously sunny and pulled in large, good-natured crowds with some very reasonably priced beer, live music and some free memorabilia. Looking to take a Chicago visitor on a good stroll? It’s been a long time coming, but the 606 has finally arrived, and it’s a pretty great addition to the city below.
At the 606 launch with Randi, Katie and Brandon
Randi Lawrence, Katie Sharing, Ellen Wohlberg, Emilie Bouvier, Jonathan Jenkins liked this post.
