My friend Sarah was in town for the American Library Association conference, so we had lunch and went on a boat tour of downtown architecture. The volunteer docent talked for ninety minutes non-stop about the details of architecture and the history of buildings in Chicago. She was beyond impressive. It's a good tour to take if you're in Chicago, but you might want to time it better than we did and go when it's not 90 degrees with the sun beating down. Wow - when did I think I'd ever say that? I've become a real Chicagoan, I guess, and have come to expect that cool lake breeze.
On the way downtown - and if you need me to tell you my means of transport, you really haven't been paying attention - a woman sitting next to me struck up a conversation. She looked to be in her 30's and was in town with her husband, brother, niece, and assorted other family visiting from Cleveland, Tennessee. They were staying in Rogers Park and were headed to Daley Center to pray for people. She was a very nice woman, and she asked me if there was anything I'd like her to pray for on my behalf. A job, she suggested/asked? (We had been talking about my job search.) I'm not really into prayers for specific things, so I awkwardly suggested that she pray for "general goodness" which really has to be the dumbest thing I've said in weeks. And that's a high bar. I probably should have suggested that they head to Springfield to help figure out Illinois's pension problem. Still, it was nice of her to offer.
Sarah is someone I used to babysit. Probably the first time I babysat for her she was younger than her three-year-old daughter is now, and that's just weird to contemplate. But it was fun to catch up, and I was able to give her a heads-up that she should expect gigantic crowds in the area on Friday, Friday being the day of the ginormous Blackhawks Stanley Cup celebration. If I had failed to mention it, the topic would have come up anyway because as we were walking along Michigan Avenue we saw this:
Yes, that is a Blackhawks helmet on the lions in front of the Art Institute. Apparently at other times the lions have worn Bears helmets and Bulls jerseys, and White Sox and Cubs gear. The Cubs gear must have been out of some desire for baseball team equity or something, unless perhaps it was back in 1908 which is possible since the lions have been there since 1894. We also saw a line of people waiting to get into a store on Michigan Avenue - turns out it was the Blackhawks store. We love us some world champions.
On the way home, I got off the Red Line a couple of stops early to go to the new weekly market on Argyle Street in the Uptown neighborhood. This is an area with a lot of Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese stores and restaurants. Apparently the branding of the area (branding being all the rage in commercial redevelopment) has been somewhat controversial because you can't call it, for instance, Little Burma since that excludes the non-Thai businesses, etc. So they settled on Asia on Argyle which has a nice alliteration. The CTA station has a cool feature not seen at other stations:
The sign just went up this winter, and it sounds like people didn't like it. Go figure. I think it's okay, because I'm not so concerned about these sorts of signs. The brand is the actual fact that there are a ton of Asian shops and restaurants. Why does it surprise anyone that putting up a sign is pretty irrelevant to what people think of the area? The market itself was nice, and I got to meet my Alderman, Harry Osterman. (His mom was Kathy Osterman, for whom my beach is named.) By all reports he's a good guy, and he certainly seemed friendly enough when I went up to him and introduced myself.
Friday morning at 7:30 a.m. one of the local news stations was showing massive crowds of Hawks fans, a sea of red and black, and the parade wasn't scheduled to begin for three hours. The city estimated two million people attended - which is about one of every five people living from the Wisconsin border to Joliet. Did I mention that we love us some world champions?
Through careful planning, I missed the crowd on Friday and spent a couple of hours with my cousin, Jeff, and his wife, Patty. They live in Los Angeles now but used to live in Chicago. We met for lunch at one of their old favorite places, the Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park, and it was good to catch up. Cousins are great - you have the bonds of family and past that let you reconnect easily, but you don't (or at least, I don't) have a lot of baggage that gets in the way.
Saturday was a very busy day and I will spare you the details, but it did include baking cookies and brownies to take to church this morning for a bake sale the kids are having.
My new church, Second Unitarian, is located in Lakeview - often called "Boys Town" because over the past twenty or thirty years it has become something of a gay mecca. They (I should start saying "we") have a really active social action program at 2U (as the church is called). A 2U group will be marching in the Gay Pride Parade this afternoon, and the kids are having a lemonade stand/bake sale. Hence, the cookies and brownies. Yeah, sometimes I outdo myself. I can't walk in the parade this year, as I am going to drop off the cookies and then head to Omaha for Goldnerpalooza, a Celebration of All Things Goldner.
Luckily, on Saturday afternoon there was another pride event that a 2U contingent walked in, so I was able to participate in something. I could describe it as an event created by people who felt that the official Pride Parade was too corporate, political, and organized. Or I could just tell you that it's called Dyke March.
This is a gay pride march the way gay pride marches used to be, back when the Supreme Court was upholding laws that criminalized homosexual activity and before politicians east of San Francisco decided they liked gay voters - and even before Subaru identified lesbians as a great market. There are no corporate sponsors and from what I could tell no politicians. It's run by something called the Dyke March Collective which made me look around for people passing around granola and weed. I saw neither.
What I did see was a sea of humanity ranging from a bunch of very boring looking people, such as myself, to a few people wearing much more unusual clothing:
Yes, that's a tail. And she was blowing bubbles. Why not? But there was more diversity than just somebody in a leopard costume. There were straight people, gay people, transgendered people, and everyone in between. There were drummers (of course there were) and people with babies and some motorcyclists (although they didn't ride their bikes in march.) There was a woman with a two-sided sign in three languages protesting the treatment of gays in Chile, Russia and Greece. She spoke with an accent but the fact that she's holding a cigarette while carrying the sign is prima facie evidence enough that she is from somewhere in Europe.
I even met a young transgender lesbian from Omaha. She was friends with one of the people from church and had come out - pun definitely intended - for the weekend. I offered her a ride back but she already had a Megabus ticket for Tuesday night.
2U hadn't gotten their yellow "Standing on the Side of Love" shirts yet from the Unitarian Universalist Association, so I wore mine from the UU Congregation of Fort Wayne. That was a good transitional step for me - sort of like one foot in the past and one in the future. It's harder for me to let go of my Fort Wayne congregation than I had thought it would be.
Anyway, twenty years ago, all it took to be provocative was some drag queens and a couple of "We're Here, We're Queer, Get Over It" signs. It's harder to do that now, what with the Supreme Court striking down DOMA and professional athletes coming out and over half of Americans supporting marriage equality. And so, of course, if one's goal is to be "out there" one must continue moving farther out.
And so they did.
First off, this was a march and not a parade. There were no floats and not even any easily identified groups. Some people carried banners but we all just sort of moved along as one snakelike mass of a couple thousand people.
Along the way we were greeted by folks who had obviously come out (no pun intended) to watch, and a somewhat larger number of people who had made the mistake of attempting to drive in Uptown during the march. Everyone was either friendly or quietly sullen (most of the sullen ones were in cars and I can't say I blame them.)
Of course there were chants as we walked along. They had so many - fifteen - that they printed them on a little piece of paper which was handed out. A young woman next to me, walking with her boyfriend, commented that some of the chants probably wouldn't bring many people over to our side, and I can't say I disagreed with her. I won't repeat them here because my nephews read the blog and in Aunt Karen's mind they aren't ready for R movies or strong language. I will plead guilty to occasionally (okay, often) cursing like a sailor but that doesn't mean I'm comfortable shouting those words in the street. It's that Methodist decorum that I inherited from my mother. So I joined in some of the chants, and parts of others, and otherwise just took the whole scene in.
The topics of the chants were pretty wide flung - not just GLBT and women's issues, but prisons (anti-) and the Palestinians (pro-) as well. Quite a radical group, and it was fun to be part of it. It was especially fun to walk behind these women:
Check out the Hawks tattoo. This picture is so Chicago pride. Of all kinds.
And now, to 2U to drop off the cookies and then I'm hitting the road for Goldnerpalooza. Have a great Fourth of July and we'll catch up soon.
Your posts always make me want to move to or at least visit Chicago.
ReplyDeleteYou are always welcome!
Delete