There’s probably no other city in North America, other than New York City, that is like Chicago in terms of the staggering number of arts and culture events that you can go to at any given day. There’s music, theater, dance, film, visual arts, even glassmaking, pottery-making, tattoo art demonstrations- you name it you can find it here, in rickety schoolrooms converted into theaters, in cavernous loft warehouse spaces, in parks and botanical gardens, in gleaming, acoustically-perfect music pavilions, in art galleries and antique shops. There’s high-art and low-art, spectacular extravaganzas and intimate chamber performances, world-class productions and artists and brazen “hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show-in-the-barn” performances. And you have a pick of them at any given day of the week. Last Saturday was one of those days when I felt truly lucky to be living in the arts vortex that is Chicago. I started the evening off with a marvelous, perfectly put-together Gershwin tribute concert (for free!) with acclaimed Broadway stars, and a brilliant up-and-coming Russian pianist, framed by a skyline glowing in the sunset at Millennium Park’s stunning Pritzker Pavilion, and ended it after midnight at a dark, dank, perspiration-inducing storefront in Uptown where the bathrooms were scarier than the Blair Witch Project, but where the whole air was tingling with artistic ambition treading on a high-wire without a safety net. Man, this is why I love living in this city!
Jul 22
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