dom.blog

On stage at Common Room

Remember Common Room? Wednesday night was the fourth outing of this theatre taster event, and the inaugural ‘interview an audience member’ segment which – as you can see – I made it into.

And this got me thinking… man, I really need to go see more of these plays which I’m hearing so much about. And that’s how I ended up spending this afternoon chasing a rabbit with a French accent all over the neighbourhood of Andersonville in Upended Production’s Alice.

Inspired by Lewis Carroll, the audience (who all take the role of ‘Alice’) are broken into small groups – each assigned a different rabbit – and move between whimsical and fantastical scenes staged in nearby streets, bars, shops. On the routes between each ‘scene’ there are also weird and wonderful sights and mini-interactions with the audience, like this:

One of the many roaming cast members. (Hopefully.)

I have to admit, I was a little worried it would feel a little too surreal in the sense of ‘arbitrary random stuff’, but actually everything felt very carefully put together and was surprisingly thought provoking. There are so many people I would recommend this to, and most of them don’t live in Chicago, but if you do you should check it out. (And next week I am going to see another production promoted through the Common Room – hurray!)

Late night pizza bite

Have been doing a bunch of other fun stuff, too. Like meeting up with the one and only Emily Boyd, who was visiting town from New York! I also almost broke Randi’s Californian heart by introducing her to the concept of full English breakfasts, which we made this morning. (Tastes like home!)

I also saw Saved, cheered on the Baltimore Orioles in the baseball playoff season, got treated to a swanky lunch at the Art Institute by a friend of Carolyn’s (still haven’t managed to go in to the Art Institute, mind) and went to my first Chicago jazz club. Which was a bit of a fail, actually, because although the jazz was good I decided that I’d prefer to be able to actually hear the conversation I was having, so we retreated to a regular jazz-free bar instead.

Aside from my own entertainment and shenanigans, in the past few weeks I’ve also started volunteering for two separate tutoring/mentoring projects. I will probably write more about these elsewhere, after a couple more weeks, but suffice to say it’s always an interesting challenge to work with children. And I don’t mean that as a euphemism for ‘difficult’ or ‘unpleasant’ – it’s just something which demands conscious adjustment after not actually being a child for a while. Pretty rewarding if you can get it right, though.

Just home from Six Flags, a US chain of theme parks with one place not far from Chicago, which I had suggested as a great option for a work team outing. It turned out to be perfect timing, too, because this was also Jill’s last week at Groupon, and I can’t think of a better way to say goodbye than riding a load of rollercoasters together. (My favourite was Goliath, for the record.) I have always been spoilt in loving the people that I work with, but it must make all the difference in the world.

Team photo (Robert, Jill, Katie, me)

This week I also returned to Second City, making good on my vow from my first visit. This time we saw the main stage show – and each consumed a pitcher-worth of cocktails – which is an excellent recipe for any evening.

On Saturday I also made it to the Chicago Botanic Garden with Randi, It was a pretty British-style trip, actually: catch a train to somewhere with a tea room, and pretend you haven’t noticed that it’s just started raining. But I’m very glad I remembered the suggestion to go, because it was beautiful, and just a really lovely place to wander about. (I can’t say the same for the patch of suburbia around it, which makes crossing the road feel like an expedition through an alien landscape. Love the city, hate the strip mall.)

Botanic Garden

In other news:

• I now have a rudimentary understanding of the rules of American football.
• In return, I have begun to indoctrinate newbies into the wonder of Doctor Who.
• UK timezones worked in my favour for once when it came to the Scottish referendum, because by the time I went to bed the result was pretty clear. Which was a relief, I’ll admit, but it’s pretty exciting that there’s still a head of steam for further devolution and constitutional reform. I hope both sides can end up feeling like winners in the end.

Well, I came back from Malaysia, obviously. But not before a lovely evening up on Helipad with Zee and Ellen, which – as its name suggests –  is a bar sitting atop a skyscraper. It’s remarkably calm up there, which is probably just as well because I could imagine a rowdier crowd occasionally bumping people off the edge.

Helipad

Back in ‘merica, I hit another milestone of cultural acclimatisation by whacking my first birthday piñata, plus a bunch of other fun meetings and gatherings. (Which included a pool party. I mean seriously, a pool party? My life is absurd.) I also saw Guardians of the Galaxy. Which was OK, I guess, though I wasn’t sure exactly what it was aiming at. (How funny is this supposed to be exactly?) And I have to admit, after X Men: Days of Future Past on the plane back, I am ready for my next film to be something a little grittier. Y’know – the moody existentialist broodings of a failed artist, in French – or something like that. Never thought I’d be asking for that.

I’ve also been wandering around feeling a little sad about Scotland. On the one hand, a peaceful referendum on self-determination is pretty much a miracle of democracy: this doesn’t happen very often, and something to feel proud of. But at the same time, I share the same apprehensions of lots of other English people for entirely selfish reasons. Scotland is great, and often wiser than its southern neighbour, and would be perfectly fine as an independent country within the EU. The fear is what kind of conservative backlash this may trigger in the rest of the UK. We’ll find out next week, I suppose!

In the meantime, and on a cheerier note, I finally got some photos on my wall up. There are lots of important people missing, but everyone here is loved:

Memories from home

I crammed a lot into the past week – I think I’m secretly hoping to be so exhausted for the excessively long plane journeys ahead that I just conk out. (More on that later.) Back on Saturday night, we celebrated Nolan’s birthday for what I counted as the third time, but admittedly it was a significant birthday and he is a significant individual.

The next afternoon, I was lucky enough to get invited along to a pub crawl hosted by the League of Chicago Theatres. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “oi, Dominic, you don’t work in the theatre. Why are you crashing their events?” To which I would reply, defensively, that I was invited – and more effusively, that Chicago’s theatre folk turn out to be an extraordinarily lovely bunch. I mean, no offence to – say – lawyers, but I have trouble imagining the League of Chicago Lawyers’s pub crawl would be anywhere near as fun, or culminate in such good cabaret either.

I’m not senior enough for a black jacket, yet

This week included a free screening of The Blind Side in the park after work with Suzanne and co. Now, if we’re being honest, we should acknowledge that this is not a good film. I mean, if we were really being serious we’d say it was a patronising white saviour narrative – but let’s just settle for it being overflowing to the brim with cheesy American schmaltz.

All true, but there was also fair amount of wine, a generous spread of picnic food and excellent company. And I learnt a teeny tiny bit more about American football. So.

Sunset from the lake

The next evening, Lauri invited me to come sailing with her friends on Lake Michigan. I’m not great with boats – it’s the same kind of headachey problem as the banana variety – but I must say it was worth it to see the sun set over the city, and watch the beautiful red harvest moon rise over the lake. I may have to wait another year for peak summer temperatures again, but I really would like to try swimming there too.

And then tonight I made excellent use of my free pair of Theatre Thursday tickets (acquired at some point during Sunday’s drinking) to go see a musical version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. I thought it did impressive justice to a memorably creepy book, and (icing on the cake) it was nice to spend a night listening to British accents use words like ‘flat’ and ‘telly’ for an hour or two. (We had a tasty Indian meal beforehand, actually, so it was quite the Dominic-friendly night.)

Tomorrow I am going to a baseball field again to actually watch baseball: White Sox vs. Blue Jays, if you’re interested. Todd has instructed me to cheer for the latter, which I’m more than happy to do. Especially as they are Canadian. And then I should probably pack or sleep or something, because I have a 6am flight to Kuala Lumpur the next morning. Yup, I’m going to Malaysia! For work, for two weeks, which is just as well given the flight takes approximately six thousand years. It’s just you and me now, Kindle.