Freshly showered, dressed in my blue miniskirt with the "30 Seconds to Mars" patch on the back, a white scoop-neck shirt, and my black leather Cole Haan walking shoes, I was good to go…until the phone rang.
K held the phone to her boom box and said, "Listen to this." It was Al Green. Man I haven't heard any Al Green in a while and he is sooooooooooo good. When the song finished she said, "How come, after what 5? American Idols, no one like Al Green has been discovered?"
"Well I think if you are as good as Al Green you don't need American Idol. You are out there singing whenever and wherever you can and the music producers hear about you and you are signed. Cream to the top." That satisfied K.
My travel partner arrived and I grabbed my bag when my phone rang again, "Please pick up. Please. C'mon sis." So I had to answer.
"Turn on blah blah blah, it's Stevie Ray Vaughan. Now this is the blues. Turn it on. I think he's even better than Jimi Hendrix, plays the guitar behind himself too. Did you know he died in a helicopter crash just 10 minutes from me? Up at Alpine Valley, 1990, there was fog and they forgot about the ski hill and crash, gone. Oh listen….."
I haven't said a word and I am now listening to music again…it was sweet…bend those notes. "I can't get it. Remember when you called me about the Blue Man Group? You have a different cable company."
"I'll have to tape it for you. You would LOVE it."
"I'm off to the city for a couple days. Call me on my cell if you need me. TAPE IT!!!!!"
So my head was all jammed up with music as I left for Chicago. I wanted to see the new Millennium Park. I have been dreaming of it. It opened just weeks ago, although it was supposed to open in 2000. Excellent things sometimes take longer than expected.
Today is September 5, 2004, Labor Day Weekend. I am hoping all of the city people left for elsewhere.
I drove the first half hour, until we reached Russell's. It is the only place this side of Iowa where you can get a genuine loose-meat sandwich; make that beef with Russell's famous (deservedly so) barbecue sauce. That was for my pal (Men seem to have an almost natural instinct for shoving barbecues in their mouths.)
Me? I went for shrimp, peeled the breading off, and something new on their menu…deep-fried macaroni and cheese wedgies. I am not kidding. The wedgies were little cakes less than a ½" thick and about the size of the wooden triangle pieces you put into circle-square-triangle puzzles when you were a kid. They didn't taste bad or good, just rather interesting in a heart-attack nightmare way.
My pal drove the rest of the way to the city. More traffic than I expected but still not bad. We parked in the Monroe Street Parking Garage, the underground one, right beneath Millennium Park. (Millennium Park is located on Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe, that's right down in the Loop.)
You take an elevator up to the surface. And the world opens up to a land of botanicals and chrome. There are special gardens here and there, some with flowering plants, mostly evergreens. And you start to walk over a long, wavy pedestrian sculpture bridge all in shiny chrome.
There are lots of people today, international, from all over the world. It is 85 degrees and humid thanks to an early morning rain. The air is still, no customary cool breeze coming off Lake Michigan.
The first thing I see is the band shell. It is a riot of chrome bent into flaps jutting left and right, back and forward. The seats are red, a deep, almost terra cotta on fire red. That leads to an expansive grassy area where people can sit to listen to music. Overhead is this immense spider web of twisted steel laid out in a grid pattern with dual speakers attached at each intersection. The band shell has already received kudos from bands and listeners, "one of the best in the country" I've heard. There isn't anyone playing today so I can't tell you if that is true or not. Instead the park is littered with street musicians, mostly horn players today. They are terrific.
I turned to my left and there was Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate. Oh. It is the one thing I was most excited to see. It is highly-polished chrome, looks like a lima bean, a really huge one, and indeed does reflect the viewers and the city and the sky. It is magnificent. You can walk inside of it. Inside it reshapes itself convexly, then concavely, and ends in a smallish circle at the top. Now when you are in there you might wave your hand, like I did, to see where you might be located. Oddly you won't appear. The man behind me was doing the same thing and we both came away perplexed. That's how good the cloud gate was.
Behind us were the dual fountains. Again they are huge, like 50' tall each. This is public sculpture so it has to be BIG. Each of the fountains is like a wall made of glass block with water dripping over them. They are spaced about 50 yards apart with a base made of dark square tiles. All of the tiles are wet. That is called the pool. Now the cool part is that each of the fountains displays a face. The face is static, and then the person opens their eyes, or smiles. There are over 1000 faces programmed into the fountains. Since it was so hot kids were jumping in the water, and some adults, like me, took our shoes off and walked in the water. It was great. Then just before we walked away the fountains did something that made everyone laugh, and the children go crazy. I won't tell you what it is because I don't want to spoil it for you.
The section of the park with a Coliseum-like structure had an exhibit called Family Album by Uwe Ommer.
It was a large series of photographs about 4' x 5' of people, families, from around the world dressed in their folkwear or what I would call Sunday Best. Underneath the photo were a few sentences about the people pictured. The picture of a family from Egypt showed a man with eight children. The caption stated that the wife wasn't allowed to be in the picture, instead she instructed the children to smile while she hid behind a door. The Campoor family stated they raided the neighboring villages for cattle and the next week the villagers took back what they stole, a never-ending cycle. All of the people seemed very proud, and what amazed me most was how little these people got by on.
This isn't really art, it is more of a historical, sociologically look at people from other lands, very easily digestible for the general populace, of interest to all. I liked it. One fact I should not dismiss: when you turned around and looked at the people viewing the exhibit they were from all of the countries shown in the photographs!
The rest of the 24 acres is more gardens, a bike park, and a large streetside café where you can get a pop or a cocktail, nice wine list too!
From Millennium Park we walked kitty-corner across Columbus Drive to hear a jazz festival. That was fine too, sprawled out on the grass, looking up at the haze, tiny flickers of movement in the trees, and jamming in our heads. Cool.
We did a bunch of stuff at Montrose Harbor, the Seurat exhibit at the Art Institute, food, music, a crazy time at HoJo's…but most of that happened the next day and I really wanted to tell you about Millennium Park which I did, so I think that's enough, without revealing every inch of my life. Hope you had a good one too! Labor Day Get-a-way, that is!
Here's some links:
SPOILER!!!!!!!DO NOT CLICK THIS UNLESS YOU WANT TO SEE THE FOUNATIN SURPRISE
thatartgirl
