Back in June we went to see Theater of the Mind. The lady was already in the city spending time with friends who lived on the far north side so I took the bus from Madison to Union Station where we'd meet as she was going to take Metra downtown. It was grey and cloudy as the bus dropped me off on Jackson Blvd. with the iconic Sears Towers just a couple blocks to the east.
The older I get the less I want to drive and so taking the bus was really nice. When I wasn't watching the scenery, I got some reading in and never had to worry about Chicago traffic. Once I found my ladyfriend, our first stop was our usual Loop lunch spot, Elephant & Castle, a chain of English-themed pub & restaurants. There are two in downtown Chicago and we tend to hit the one on Adams which is half a block from La Salle and on this day this is where our ultimate destination was located. Plus going there gives me a chance to walk by The Rookery where my grandfather worked.
Going in we found that there was soccer, er, football on every TV. Shocking, I know.
Being a beer lover, I wonder about the paucity of beer from the British Isles on the menu. Guinness, London Pride, and Speckled Hen was all, methinks. I don't expect any Black Country Ales or any of the other fine brews I sampled in England last year but those Iron Maiden brews are tasty and available here in the States. The Trooper, at least, is fairly common.
We crossed the river on La Salle. There's Marina Towers and behind them stands the former IBM building where my parents met. I think that's the Aqua in the middle in blue. Just across the river was our destination, the Reid Murdoch Building, someplace I don't believe I'd ever been previously.
Theater of the Mind is hard to describe. Interactive performance art? Created by David Byrne, he of Talking Heads fame, and his Frau, Mala Gaonkar, it's a journey to the center of your mind guided by your late pal, David. The ad copy notes that the show was inspired by neuroscience and we learn on our journey that our senses are easily fooled and that memory is not as accurate and encompassing as we sometimes believe it to be. With such imperfect tools, maybe our sense of self, our identities, are houses built on sand.
To begin, our group was ushered into a chamber of (not quite 32) doors. In the middle was a miniature house and our guide opened its roof revealing nametags for us. Once we had all assumed an identity, our guide then chose a seemingly random door and we made our way into the next room. It proved to be a viewing parlor at a funeral home where our friend David's casket sat before us atop a bier which was, in fact, a piano.
Ere long the casket is opened...from the inside. David emerges to greet us. Our David was played by Kelli Simpkins whose mild androgyny seemed a perfect fit for such a performance. Clad in a cream colored suit that gave off strong Stop Making Sense vibes, David reminisced a bit before an introductory speech that prepared us for the rest of the show.
Taking a seat at the piano, David introduced us to the tritone and a weird aural illusion whereby two notes are played that some people hear as ascending while others hear as descending. No wonder this deceptive musical combination was called The Devil's Interval. The parlor had a checkered floor and David demonstrated a simple optical illusion with it before ushering us down a red hallway that looked not wholly unlike the airlock in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I felt a bit of the unheimlich at this point as it was a Dave in that scene too.
(All photos are from the show's website. I think.)
I think the red light was chosen not only as a contrast to the white light we were accustomed to but also to stimulate our night vision for the next room which was the inside of David's cranium. Minus the grey matter. Here we learned about afterimages which not only continued the theme of our senses being imperfect but also stood as a metaphor for our lives, our construKtion of memories. The people we meet, the places we go, and the things we do all leave afterimages when they are over or exit our lives and our brains construct memories from them.
But not every demonstration was about fooling our sense of sight or hearing.
The show moves from your senses to how your brain works and the role memories play. We go backstage and David describes, if memory serves, a job he had that involved watching security cameras. And so we watched a scene on a TV of a street. Every several seconds the screen would change to black very briefly and the scene would return. But something within it had changed. Although we witnessed a few dozen changes, I only caught a handful.
When you enter David's childhood home memory takes center stage. We stepped into a kitchen where everything is huge - the chairs are 10 feet tall plus, the counters tower over you. It's all the perspective of a young child. And then we were led to the attic where David talked a bit about his childhood and then we sat down and donned VR glasses. Although I had used them previously, it was genuinely odd to "inhabit" the body of someone else here.
We thoroughly enjoyed Theater of the Mind. Not only was it fun to wander around a large set and have my senses fooled, but it provided a lot of food for thought. The whole thing was quite Phildickian - as if we were replicants discovering that our memories aren't even ours. I was reminded of the Satanic panic of the 1980s & 90s when thousands of people "remembered" and made claims of ritual abuse (and even blood sacrifice) that were wholly without merit. On a more personal level, I thought of instances when my childhood memories were contradicted by friends and also the many, many times I failed to remember events that my ex-wife brought up in arguments.
For about a year prior to her filing for divorce and for a couple weeks after she did so, my ex-wife reproached me many, many times about incidents that I could rarely, if ever, recall. After countless accusations and loaded questions, I came to the conclusion that her Torquemada-like behavior was a mixture of lies and confabulation, of spite and misremembering.
My lady and I caught the El to Jefferson Park where we took a rideshare ride back north to her friends' place. As we waited, I glanced at the Gale Street Inn across the street, recalling that it had reopened and that I would like to go there sometime to see what's changed. Would the food match my memories of it?
Back at the northern edge of the city, I got to meet my lady's friends for the first time after hearing about them for months. We were treated to dinner before hitting the road for Madison and I had some extremely tasty beef brisket smoked by our host.
Two or three weeks later my ladyfriend and I returned to Chicago. A cousin of mine from the Bay area was in town to celebrate his recent retirement and so there was a shindig at the home of a couple other cousins of mine. In fact, just about everyone there was a cousin except for the significant others of cousins.
Everyone had a nice time. My family liked my new ladyfriend and she liked them. She got a laugh when one of my cousins complained that another had just spoiled the ending of Death of a Salesman. Ha!
Sadly my mother was unable to attend the soiree and finally meet the new woman in my life. However, this was remedied the following weekend as we went down again. This time she'd meet my mother and we would go on a neighborhood tour of North Lawndale with Dilla Thomas.
We arrived at my mother's place with plenty of time to spare and so we went and ate breakfast in Jefferson Park. We sat around and chatted for a long time after we'd paid the bill which I took as a good sign. My mother and ladyfriend got along well.
However, the time came when we had to give up our table and begin a leisurely drive to the west side. Since we had the time to spare, I drove us through the neighborhood where I lived as a kid and my lady got to see the house I grew up in. Looking at it from the street, I thought about being a young child and pictured the kitchen as I did then with everything being so tall a la Theater of the Mind. Just how reliable were my childhood memories?
North Lawndale is a west side neighborhood and the tour bus was to pick us up at the Douglass Park field house. We arrived a tad early and wandered the magnificent field house which was built in the 20s or 30s. It reminded me a lot of the elementary schools I attended in Chicago except that they weren't adorned with reliefs of mermen.
We discovered that the auditorium, which was more like a ballroom, was extremely well air conditioned. Also, that it was gorgeous, despite my inability to get a decent photo.
Thankfully my ladyfriend is a better photographer than me.
Just look at the detail of the ceiling.
What seemed to be a dining area off of the auditorium continued the nautical relief theme.
Not only did the park have a pond, but also a rather sizeable swimming pool.
The basement is an arts center with a large area for folks to practice their painting skills.
Indeed, many had and, looking around, I discovered the park's namesake as there were many portraits of him adorning the walls such as this one.
His wife Anna also got some love.
Before we knew it, the tour's start time was almost upon us so we went outside and took our seats on the bus. Unfortunately the air conditioning was severely compromised and we were in for a sweaty ride.
Dilla explained that the park was originally named after Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas - not wholly opposed to slavery - but was rechristened in honor of Anna and Frederick Douglass - definitely 100% against slavery. He noted that it was the simplest park renaming in Chicago history as it required only the addition of a single S.
The tour began with Dilla noting the Central European and Jewish character of the neighborhood in its early days as the bus stopped in front of an old Turner Hall.
While I've known that Sears was a Chicago company since I was a kid, I'd never been to the old Sears Roebuck campus in North Lawndale which is now, sadly, boarded up.
Across the street was a disused colonnaded pergola that was part of a large garden that the company built as a place for employees to relax and take a break from the retail grind.
Dilla explained that the famous Sears catalogue and the company's policy of cash on delivery was a boon for black shoppers who often found themselves excluded from stores.
We also got to see the original Sears Tower - not shown.
I didn't know that Allstate insurance started as a subsidiary of Sears until we were parked outside their abandoned headquarters building.
As we were leaving the Sears campus, Dilla pointed out a warehouse that had been taken over by the Chicago Police Department. It turned out to be the infamous facility where dozens of people were detained and/or tortured under the aegis of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. I had heard about this stain on Chicago's history but had never been by the infamous site.
After driving for a bit more we found ourselves outside the Dr. King Legacy Apartments which were on the site of the apartment that Martin Luther King lived at during his time in the city.
It was really neat to see this site where MLK lived in my hometown as it made for a nice bookend to seeing the house he and his family inhabited when they lived in Montgomery, Alabama as well as all of the civil right sites and museums there.
The final stop of the tour was a bit outside of North Lawndale - the Garfield Park Field House with its golden dome.
The façade was stunning.
The place was built in 1928 and was equally gorgeous on the inside. (Though not bigger.)
There were several reliefs on the walls of the entry hall. Not shown are the ones lauding the road building prowess of Illinois. They, perhaps, haven't aged as well as the others considering all of traffic jams and road construction that plague the highways of the Chicago area.
My only gripe about the place was that the air conditioning was down. D'oh. It just wasn't to be a cool tour.
Well, soon enough it was time to jump back on the bus and head back to Douglass Park. It had been another very interesting tour with Dilla full of great architecture as well as enlightening Chicago history whether it be about the park system, commerce, etc. or the darker sides of the city's past such as the torture scandal, redlining, disinvestment, and so on.
We drove back north and I decided that we'd give Gale Street Inn: The Next Generation a try.
The joint seemed a bit more upscale than the version I was used to and I felt a bit underdressed in shorts and a t-shirt. But no one minded. The menu seemed a bit less like a yeoman's steak/ribs/chop house, although those were still options, and it seemed an effort was made to appeal to a more discerning, shall we say, palate with fancy seasonal salad dressings, for example. I do recall that the more workmanlike chopped salad was no longer on the menu. (Or am I misremembering? Damn you David Byrne and your existential uncertainty!) I am not complaining, mind you. I mean, how could I complain with their French onion soup being amongst the best to ever go down my throat?
They did not skimp on the cheese and the broth was quite tasty. I swore I caught a touch of wine in there. Mmm...great stuff!
We dropped my mother off at her place after dinner and hit the Kennedy. I think she and my ladyfriend got along well. I was pleased that their first meeting went smoothly and that we all got to see some sights and get a large dose each of Chicago history.
On the way home we made a quick stop in Schaumburg at Deli 4 You where I grabbed a bag of snacks for my co-workers.
Maple syrup and paprika seemed like an incongruous combination so I went with it. Upon sampling I determined that either they needed less maple flavoring or more paprika or both. Still, I didn't let the unbalanced taste stop me from indulging.
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