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The Railcar

Last weekend, Randi and I turned up to play The Railcar: an escape room adventure which was an inspired Christmas present for us from Tash. We didn’t escape the train – we got really close! – but we did succeed in saving the city of Chicago from certain disaster. And our friendly team of strangers proved pleasingly competent too. If this blog’s existing stream of escape room testimonials haven’t persuaded you to try one yet, then this is also highly recommended.

In other “people just give us tickets to stuff now” news, our first theatre trip of 2016 was Bruise Easy (thank you, Grace!), a play about two separated siblings who share an awkward reunion in Southern California. After my lovely Christmas in Malibu, this provided a much-needed corrective by insisting that all families there are really deeply miserable. To repay Grace’s generosity I invited her and Kevin round to catch up and enjoy Abbi’s sweet potato cottage pie (so deceptively easy the last time I made it) and promptly risked all our lives by using outdated vegetable broth. Maybe the gifts will stop once people learn how I repay them.

I blame Emily’s blog for inciting wanderlust, so I’ve spent the rest of my spare time so far this year sitting indoors booking trains, planes and snowmobiles…

There’s maybe a 50/50 chance I have seen The Merry Wives of Windsor. I have some memory of doing so, but it’s also quite possible I dreamt it, and there’s no record on this blog. If I did, it didn’t leave me with an abiding appreciation for Sir John Falstaff, which is a shame because Sir John is a great comic character: the fat, drunken, cowardly knight who is subject to endless practical jokes. (Originally the character was called John Oldcastle, but then one of his descendants complained, forcing Shakespeare to change the name and add an epilogue promising that any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, was purely coincidental.)

I bring this up in gratitude to Marti for inviting us to the Backroom Shakespeare Project’s take on Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2 mashed together) which, as the name suggests, takes place in a relaxed setting at the back of a pub and finally got me properly acquainted with Sir John. Chatting and wandering about among the audience is encouraged – which explains how I was able to scan Wikipedia for so many facts while trying to follow along with the plot – as is improvisation and levity up on stage. The result is a performance which simultaneously diverges from the original (I’m pretty sure Prince Hal didn’t always steal cheeseburgers) and more authentically recreates the rowdy and boisterous atmosphere of actual Elizabethan theatre. (I’m not a time-traveller, so I’m trusting in what we were taught in GCSE English.)

On the theme of authentic recreations, I should mention Star Wars: The Force Awakens which I saw with Randi, Nolan, Todd and Carolyn on Saturday. As a group, we ranged from “Star Wars was the most perfect movie from my childhood” to “I’ve never seen Star Wars before”, so it must be a good sign that everyone enjoyed themselves, and were still talking about it at Robert and Julie’s leaving party later that night. J.J. Abrams certainly has a gift for taking a tired old franchise and making it fun again. [Insert joke about taking on the presidential debates here. Seriously, though, they are not even fun anymore. Karol can attest to this.]

Salt-N-Pepa! (photo credit: Sheri Whitko Photography, flickr.com/photos/grouponcorporate/)

Left of centre

Other things: I fulfilled a life’s ambition I didn’t even know I had by seeing Salt-N-Pepa perform at Groupon’s 007-themed holiday party. It was especially nice to prelude this year’s party with a game of drinking Jenga at Todd’s. And speaking of drinking games, for Hanukkah we came up with an inspired game of dreidel which included shouts of “power gimel!” (two in a row) and then Hanukkah transfer tattoos.

Merry Chrismukkah!

Necessary alcohol (and it sure was necessary) was provided by Nisreen’s lightning-fast Bundle Club company, and in turn this reminded me that I hadn’t seen Nisreen in far too long, so we followed-up with a lunch to set the world to rights.

It’s a mahoosive one this year:

On a mission

And the whole way home I was terrified of being arrested and/or deported and/or shot and killed for ‘borrowing’ the cart. But it was totally worth it.

In other news, I was finally part of an escape room team which actually escaped a room! And a room menaced by a zombie, no less.

Very proud of team One Slaybook

I have this Modest Proposal for fixing the US drinking age. 21 is well above the international norm of 18 for legally purchasing alcohol – although it turns out to be 25 in some parts of India, who knew? – and the usual justification is that drinking and driving is a bad idea. Drinking and driving is a terrible idea, no doubt, so why not go one further and allow 18-21 year olds to choose? You could either register for a driving licence, or a drinking licence, but not both. They’d be different colours. For those who need to drive, it would be status quo. For those who don’t, they could sign away the risk and, in return, no longer have to confine their drinking to dodgy college parties. It’s win-win, except for the conveners of dodgy college parties.

I put this idea to Will Guzzardi, a State Representative for Illinois, at a fundraising thing hosted by 270 Strategies, but he didn’t seem to think it was a priority. And given that the Republican governor of Illinois is among those indulging in brazenly racist rabble-rousing against Syrian refugees this week, maybe he has a point.

As always, a powerful counterweight to such baseness is the joy and love of good people. This was no better demonstrated than at Robert and Julie’s wedding. They are both such wonderful people, and it’s impossible not to be happy at how happy they are. To make things even better, Katie and Brandon were in town for it, and I realised how much I missed Katie’s facial expressions.

Pictures below are borrowed (with permission) from Stephanie Bassos Photography, who will make you want to get married just so you can have some of your own.

Robert and Julie

Groupon, past and present

Other than that, I’ve mostly been planning Thanksgiving / Christmas / post-Christmas-but-it’s-still-cold getaways. Randi and I did see Chapter Two last night, a play which felt very much from another time and place, which is good because it actually was (New York, 1977). There was a somewhat jarring switch from light-hearted dad-jokes in the first half to an outpouring of emotion in the second – a situation of the main characters’ own making, since they decided (for unclear reasons) that they had to get married in a week. Unless their wedding photographer was leaving the country, I couldn’t relate.

Before I write my fun ‘I’ve been travelling!’ post, I need to catch up on some Chicago things:

Learning science

Supporting Todd support the Blue Jays

Puzzling

Jatherine 1, Jatherine 2

(Clockwise: the Adler Planetarium’s ‘After Dark’ night – the same formula as London’s Science Museum, which is ‘add alcohol, remove children’ – had some cool shows and a decent lecture on dark energy. We all supported Todd through some tormenting Blue Jays games. Belatedly celebrating Catherine and Jason’s engagement – HURRAY! – with specialist wine glasses. And going, on Karl’s invitation, to the Puzzled Pint: an evening of trying to crack fiendish clues in morse code and so on.)

Also, two more shows: Home Before Dark – our pick from Common Room this month – a story of adolescent sexual exploration and abuse, and a technical rehearsal of the excellent The Play About My Dad, telling stories from Hurricane Katrina through the meta lens of a doctor in Mississippi and his playwriting daughter. This is still running until the end of November, and it’s well worth seeing.

(Tangent: I’d love to claim that endlessly blogging about plays in Chicago has now paid off into backstage invitations, but actually this came courtesy of director Marti Lyons, connected to Randi through work and coincidentally also the person behind probably our favourite play to date, Bethany, last year.)