dom.blog

Rachel takes the stage at Common Room

After a summer hiatus, Common Room is back! If you’re in Chicago, cancel everything else and come along to the next one. If you’re lucky, you’ll even get pulled on stage for the traditional ‘interview with an audience member’ segment, as Randi’s friend Rachel discovered last week.

We also introduced her to the perpetual comedy motion machine which is Improv Shakespeare at the iO.  Night of the Living Bed – the fourth production I’ve seen – was as rip-roaringly brilliant as ever and contained a commendable sequence of single-payer healthcare system puns. (Which is more than can be said of the first Republican primary debate… although if you listened closely, you could just about hear Donald Trump praising Scotland’s NHS, which was somewhat surreal.)

Lauri, Randi and me

Sadly, after his final show on Thursday, Jon Stewart is no longer around to make all that nonsense feel better. A logical alternative is to turn to drink, which we greatly enjoyed with Lauri on Friday night. And on Saturday, AJ (of the ‘British, newly arrived in Chicago’ variety) joined us for Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine. Having decided to buy tickets after seeing a few scenes at Common Room, it grew increasingly familiar until I finally searched my own brain blog and confirmed that, yes, I actually first saw this play at the Tricycle back in 2006 on a school trip. With great consideration I had avoided spoiling the plot for my future self, a courtesy I will now repeat in case this happens once again, but for the record it’s certainly a very funny and enjoyable play.

Finally, two more authentic experiences I can now check off:

• Being turned away from urgent care because of the ‘wrong’ insurance (not for me – and yes, everyone’s OK)
• Having a debit card cloned and used for fraudulent purchases at McDonald’s (and yes, I got all the money back and everything’s OK)

If Katie hadn’t visited, I’d blog about a few things:

Ingrid Michaelson at the Chicago Theatre

• Wine tasting and a major sand dune-based construction stimulus package in Michigan

• Ramya leaving for Palo Alto; Anthony seeing her off with Malört

• Gathering on picnic blankets in Millennium Park for an open-air and alcohol-friendly screening of Back to the Future. (It frustrates me that Marty grants himself a mere ten minutes at the end to try and prevent Doc’s death. I leave more buffer time to catch a train.)

• Seeing Ingrid Michaelson act all kooky but lovable in concert at the Chicago Theatre. For some reason that I made up in my head that she and Sara Bareilles were both Australian. For the record, they are not.

• Curating a ‘Trashy British TV Night’ for Catherine and Jason. The British Council should probably be paying me. (No likey? No lighty!)

But Katie did visit, so let’s skip straight to that instead:

Kayaking down the Chicago River!

Saddened by the age restrictions at Maggie Daley Park (not a joke)

Waiting outside Kuma’s Corner

The nicest Chicago-style pizza I’ve had so far at Lou Malnati’s

With a retired ex-raver pig on the roof

In addition, we (finally!) visited the Field Museum, drunk strictly non-alcoholic cocktails at the top of the Hancock Centre, enjoyed a cheeky Nando’s at their newly opened Chicago location, played an exhausting game of Munchkin against Jatherine, admired Lincoln (who doesn’t?) and continued to funnel lots of breakfast money into Windy City Café. And special mention to the Urban Kayaks tour – it’s a wonderful way to see the city afresh, and highly recommended.

I think I’ve had more than my fair share in life, but I still love surprise birthdy parties 🙂

British atmospherics

Theron and Todd with the TARDIS

With Catherine, Jason and Katie’s cake!

Nolan, Chrissy, Robert, Thomas

One more with the TARDIS because Katie took such great photos

With the person who organised it all 😉

Thank you so much to everyone who came: Billy, Taylor, Agata, Emilie, Ellen, Robert, Julie, Shelby, Benno, Calvin, Nolan, Chrissy, Brandon, Carolyn, Theron, Catherine, Jason, Ramya, Abhishek, Karol, Kevin, Corey and ESPECIALLY to:

• Todd, who organised a British-themed trivia quiz (which my team thankfully won else I’d never hear the end of it)
• Katie, who baked cakes and took photos and decorated and is generally awesome
• Randi, who masterminded the whole thing and is (a) untrustworthy  (b) amazing ❤

And also to my sisters who contributed British phrases in advance! (Did you know that “lost the plot” is not part of American English? That’s a real loss.) I love all of the above.

Turning 26 means I’ve been living in Chicago for a little over a year, and I am still blown away by the warmth and generosity of the people in my life here. It’s sad that immigration is never seen in these terms back at home. Instead it’s all migration statistics, spurious debates about welfare and tough talk about border controls. If we spent a fraction of the time celebrating instead what it takes to make people feel welcome, we’d be a happier people.

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

Campaign Finance Reform! In game form!

For Randi’s birthday on Sunday, I thought it would be fun to make a video game. (That might sound crazy, but she thought it would be fun to run a half-marathon: at least my craziness can be done sitting down.) To do this I chose Construct 2, a lovely bit of software from London-based start-up Scirra. It took a couple of weeks to get the whole thing done, but the learning curve is gentle and the basics quickly understood. If you’ve ever had the itch to make a game yourself, this is an easy yet flexible way of doing so.

I still get tingles from the power of the tools available to us today. It’s something I see with the kids I mentor with, too – with a little effort, it’s remarkably easy to quickly pull together a project which would have required feats of organisation and specialist equipment in the past. I can just about remember doing a primary school assignment on Greece, say, with an out-of-date edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, a Compton’s CD-ROM and possibly a colour printer if it wasn’t out of ink.

This makes me sound so old, I know.

Collect cash, beat turtles, avoid cars, kill zombies and more

Tomorrow night we embark on a long Memorial Day weekend to the West Coast, knocking out two more states from my travel list. I can’t promise to get to 50, but I can try 😀