Sunday, July 30, 2006
Culture Wars
Some friends and I went to Ravinia Friday night for a CSO concert. Strange as it may seem to travel forty minutes into the suburbs to hear one of the world's finest symphonies with the accompaniment of insanely loud crickets and some random lady's story about her colostomy, it actually is kind of a treat. It provides an excuse to drink jug wine and buy a plate of sandwich wraps and some taco dip from Jewel, and somehow lying on your back and staring up at a tree makes Shostokovich and Tchaikovsky even more enjoyable. Plus, it's great people watching -- I saw a teenaged nerd with a laptop and several folks with highwaisted jean shorts in the first twenty minutes. Normally you have to find tourists for such severe crimes against fashion!
But this particular Ravinia trip was not without a certain amount of peril. First, the return train was about half an hour late, leading a number of people to decide it was socially acceptable to remove their tops at the symphony. It also led to an exceedingly amusing telephone exchange I overheard between an older lady and the Metra office, in which she repeatedly declaimed that all of us who were waiting were "like sheep" and had somehow thwarted her valiant attempts to singlehandedly bring about the arrival of the train. I half expected her to launch into a segment on how teenagers dress like sluts these days and television stopped being funny in 1967. Then, when we got back to the city, cabs were nowhere to be found, causing us to walk several blocks without any idea of where we were going and have a rather unpleasant conversation with an exceedingly inebriated one-armed man before finally tracking down a taxi at the Citgo.
Culture doesn't come without its price, you know.
Some friends and I went to Ravinia Friday night for a CSO concert. Strange as it may seem to travel forty minutes into the suburbs to hear one of the world's finest symphonies with the accompaniment of insanely loud crickets and some random lady's story about her colostomy, it actually is kind of a treat. It provides an excuse to drink jug wine and buy a plate of sandwich wraps and some taco dip from Jewel, and somehow lying on your back and staring up at a tree makes Shostokovich and Tchaikovsky even more enjoyable. Plus, it's great people watching -- I saw a teenaged nerd with a laptop and several folks with highwaisted jean shorts in the first twenty minutes. Normally you have to find tourists for such severe crimes against fashion!
But this particular Ravinia trip was not without a certain amount of peril. First, the return train was about half an hour late, leading a number of people to decide it was socially acceptable to remove their tops at the symphony. It also led to an exceedingly amusing telephone exchange I overheard between an older lady and the Metra office, in which she repeatedly declaimed that all of us who were waiting were "like sheep" and had somehow thwarted her valiant attempts to singlehandedly bring about the arrival of the train. I half expected her to launch into a segment on how teenagers dress like sluts these days and television stopped being funny in 1967. Then, when we got back to the city, cabs were nowhere to be found, causing us to walk several blocks without any idea of where we were going and have a rather unpleasant conversation with an exceedingly inebriated one-armed man before finally tracking down a taxi at the Citgo.
Culture doesn't come without its price, you know.
