I was up far too late on Friday night, giving KR a ride home (her car broke down that afternoon), and then finishing up my new book… Photocopies and Staples. Give me a shout if you want a copy, as I paid exactly zero dollars for the photocopies. Kinkos screwed up my order several times, and the clerk was super nice. When everything was finally sorted out, she gave me way more copies than I asked for, and said they were on the house.
Saturday morning, 8AM, irish-girl picked me up and we headed east. We arrived unscathed in Chicago proper by about 3, but were still only just barely on time to get tickets for the 4:00 cirque show. They had only really shitty seats left in the “cheap” sections, but for the main section there were two front row tickets! I couldn’t pass that up, and since I was buying the tix (irish-girl was parking the car) I went for it. The seats turned out to be amazing, but the show would have been spectacular from anywhere. It was obviously well worth seeing. That close to the action, we could see things like performers expressions, intricate mechanics of the stage, exactly who had harnesses and who didn’t (almost nobody in this show), patches on costumes — including crotch reinforcements, the subtle twitches and shaking of the hand balancing act, the anger of the (must have been like 10 year-old) water meteor spinners when they almost missed their tricks (I don’t think they ever did miss anything but catching the rope off center appeared a wee bit dangerous), and tons of other stuff I’ve never been able to see at any other cirque show. I had seen a bootleg tape of the performance (never you mind how!), and there had been several changes to it. No juggling act, for one thing, and I never saw the crutches guy do anything other than walk around on them. It was also neat to see the one person I recognized from The Fire Within, the black female dancer/aerialist. She actually didn’t perform in the 4-person trapeze act, but was in a few other bits, including the Georgian dance act that was very different from the version I’d seen on tape.
After the show, I bought some stuff (a new shirt for Laura and CD of the music) and irish-girl and I rushed over to her cousin’s place so she could change for the poetry slam. We took a cab to the slam, and got there at least 20 minutes late. Surprisingly, we missed some introductory stuff, but they hadn’t started the competition at all, and we sat down with plenty of time to spare.
I’ll just point you to irish-girl’s entry for her depiction of the rest of the night. She wrote it the next morning before we started our 7-hour drive home. I had a good time talking with her cousin Liz (who graciously let us sleep in her apartment) and hanging out with some of the mpls. slam team, but otherwise the only thing notable was that while we were driving around downtown Chicago, I had that feverish I-want-to-live-here feeling again.
The next morning we went out for breakfast with Liz, took some pictures of the roof of her appartment building, and then headed out. When I got home there was home-made sushi with Keith and Julie. All in all, a great weekend.
SHOUT OUT~