Yesterday, I wrote about taking a tour of the Chess Records Museum during our weekend trip to Chicago. Here are a few more places we visited.
The Garfield Park Conservatory is among the most beautiful botanical gardens I’ve ever seen, ranking right up there with Butchart Gardens in Victoria, Canada — and I’m not just saying that because it displays the Harrisia Cactus. Across its multiple rooms and outdoor displays, there were more varieties of flowers, trees, plants, ferns, and other flora than I knew existed. Every few steps yielded another photo op.
As I looked around at the different species, I thought about how many of my fellow Earthlings believe that if there is life on other planets, it would probably look like us — bipeds with long arms and almond-shaped eyes. Yet the conservatory is home to a multitude of life forms in countless shapes, colors, and sizes, with not a single eye, ear, or nose among them.
I mentioned to my daughter it would be fun to spend an evening in one of Chicago’s legendary blues clubs. She immediately suggested Kingston Mines, which is the largest and oldest continuously operating blues club in Chicago. It has adjacent rooms, with bands alternating sets between the two.
The first act we saw was a guy (sorry, I can’t remember his name) singing, playing guitar and harmonica. In between tunes, he’d urge the audience to howl, at one point saying, “If you want me to play another, lemme hear you say Hell Yeah!” Of course several people in the crowd did as he asked, while I wondered whether he would really stop the show if no one had.
Before he was done, we moved next door to get seats for the next act, a five piece band performing classic blues numbers like “One Way Out” and “The Sky Is Crying.” They were terrific, especially the keyboardist and the singer/guitarist (whose names I can’t remember, either).
I was happily surprised to see that the audience was made up about evenly by men and women. I only mention it because the genre has historically appealed more to guys who are now my age. But the place was packed with lots of young people of both sexes.
For more than 25 years, I’ve made Second City a regular stop on trips to Chicago, and have seen dozens of very talented performers on its main stage. But this time — and here’s a criticism I had never made at that venue — far too much of the evening consisted of getting cheap laughs from repeated cursing and slang words about body parts. In some cases, they were the central focus of the scenes.
None of this shocked me, but I was disappointed because I’ve come to expect more from Second City. It’s the same trap too many mediocre standup comics fall into. When you stoop to that level and get those easy laughs, it’s tempting to keep doing it, rather than earning them with more clever stuff. That said, the six comic actors on stage were all very good, with a particular nod to Adisa “Di” Williams, who really impressed me in scene after scene and hopefully has a bright future ahead.
We also visited the Museum Of Science And Industry, which was running a James Bond exhibit. It included several of the cool vehicles he drove or flew and some of the devices he used, along with their real-life equivalents from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. It also had interactive stations that explain the science behind some of the inventions that came out of Q’s laboratory and the physics of some of the movies’ perfectly-executed stunts.
My favorite of those allowed visitors to try recreating the calculations that made possible this famous corkscrew jump in an AMC Hornet Hatchback, performed by stunt driver Loren “Bumps” Willert in “The Man With The Golden Gun.”