Festivals

Magnificent Mile Lights Festival – November 20, 2021

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The word “Petoskey” is a native word that translates to “rays of light.” So it’s only fitting that the Michigan city participates in a lights festival. At least 40 of Petoskey’s 1000 or so high school students, as part of a steel drum band, came to the big city and entertained the crowd from an open-air bus.

I don’t know how good their football team is – actually I do, they were 3-6 this year – but those kids sure love to bang their drums, and not slowly. I was mesmerized as they turned otherwise yawn-inducing holiday songs into a raucous rave, accentuated by tribal screams and a bouncing choreography that threatened to destroy the vehicle’s shock absorbers and flip it over like a bug (and it wasn’t even a Volkswagen).

Usually, the only holiday song I’ll listen to is Mariah Carey telling me that I’m all she wants for Christmas (though she never calls), but, just like all food tastes better with jalapeño peppers mixed into it, a bus full of steel drums goes a long way to improving otherwise undigestible music, although the after-taste, or rather after-sound, can linger on for hours and isn’t helped by drinking a glass of milk.

Scott Turow – Printers Row Lit Fest – September 12, 2021

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I once played golf with Scott Turow. He’s a better writer. He’s also an articulate speaker, so it was a shame that only 10 percent of the 345 seats in the tent were filled to see him. (I know – half a person.)

He was at the Lit Fest pushing his most recent book, The Last Trial. The plot is about a trial.

But, he noted, when asked, that plot is character, though he forgot to attribute that statement to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He praised Saul Bellow for his characters, but characterized the plot of every one of Bellow’s novels as “a guy wanders around and thinks.” Sounds like my last 18 months.

After the talk I stopped by my favorite Lit Fest spot, the vintage graphic art posters and magazine covers (more crowded than the Turow program), and studied the Orgy of the Living Dead movie poster.

Then I debated waiting around to hear Jeffrey Brown discuss his book, A Total Waste of Space-Time, which sounded like it was right up my alley, until I discovered that it was targeted toward pre-teens. What a waste. Still . . . .

Southport Arts Festival – July 13, 2019

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The Southport Arts Festival is a modest gathering, where free street parking is not that far away, at least in the daytime, and one location offers free beer.

But my main reason for going was to see Bill Larkin and his Comic Songs at the Piano (and one with a ukulele) at the Venus Cabaret. Larkin acts, including some shouting, as much as sings his original songs. I see a sort of combination of Lewis Black and Tom Lehrer in him, as his dark humor highlights people’s foolishness and foibles (including his own). The size of the crowd was disappointing, but Larkin wasn’t.

Later in the day, Neal Tobin, Necromancer, took the same stage. Necromancy is a practice of magic involving communication with the dead. After only 15 minutes of his act, Tobin made me wish I were dead, so I got up and left, thinking that his act was not worth the free price of admission, and not worrying whether he could read my mind in that regard.

As with most street fairs, there were a variety of artists and artisans displaying their work. Three attracted my attention. Time After Time, it turned out, was not selling Cyndi Lauper CDs or DVDs of H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper, but rather Historic American Rephotography, where Mark Hersch merges 100-year-old photographs with photographs he takes from the same vantage point to create a single image.

Robots in Rowboats also misled me, as most of the robots were not, in fact, in rowboats, but I guess you just can’t pass on a good alliteration.

Finally, By The Yard sells outdoor furniture recycled from plastic milk jugs. Really. Afterward, it occurred to me that I should have asked whether there was a quality difference between pieces constructed from skim, 2%, and whole milk containers.

Printers Row Lit Fest & Chicago Blues Festival- June 8-9, 2019

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In case you were wondering, the Lit in Printers Row Lit Fest refers to literature, not to the new Illinois law permitting recreational marijuana starting January 1, 2020. But maybe next year it will be both.

One of the attractions of the Lit Fest for me in the past has been the Flash Fiction writing contest held by the Mystery Writers of America. Again, in case you were wondering, the Flash in Flash Fiction refers to fiction written quickly, not fiction written about Barry Allen of DC Comics fame.

There was no contest this year. The Mystery Writers didn’t even have a tent. Or perhaps they did and it was flapping so quickly in the breeze that no one could see it.

And this year there was only one program each day that interested me. On Saturday, it was James Geary amusing the audience with a discussion of his book Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It.

As part of his presentation, he held a pun contest, with the winner receiving a copy of the book, and the losers presumably being sent to the witless protection program.

On Sunday I heard WTTW critic Hedy Weiss interview music director Jermaine Hill, and stars Monica West (Marian the librarian), and Geoff Packard (Professor Harold Hill) about the Goodman Theater’s upcoming production of The Music Man. I introduced myself to Hedy and spoke with her for about 15 minutes before the program, which I’m sure she also will mention in her next blog.

On the way to the Lit Fest Sunday, I stopped by the Chicago Blues Festival to listen to Erwin Helfer do his wonderful thing on the piano. Heller plays on Tuesday nights at the Hungry Brain, which seems like a good name for a place to go after a Lit Fest.

Summer Festivals – July 15, 2018

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I could have gone to the Square Roots Music Fest, the Windy City Smokeout (where I could have eaten beef belly burnt ends, or not), the Roscoe Village Burger Fest, the Southport Art & Music Festival, or the Dearborn Garden Walk, but I chose to go to the Chinatown Summer Fair, which was free and worth every penny of that.

The Dearborn Garden Walk would have been the most convenient, but I’ve been to the Tuileries Garden in Paris and the Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island, so why would I pay $35 to see someone’s backyard?

I opted against the Southport Art & Music Festival because I had walked past it the day before, after it closed, only to encounter an unusually foul aroma coming from somewhere in the vicinity (perhaps from a surfeit of skunks) on my way to the Mercury Theater to see Avenue Q, which unfortunately was cancelled due to the illness of one of the actors. I posited that one of the puppets had tasted, after that day’s matinee, whatever I had smelled, and was now retching up felt at the local emergency room or tailor shop.

The Chinatown Summer Fair included a petting zoo of goats, but, alas, no goat yoga, which, as a result, remains on my bucket list. There also was a meager lion dance (a line dance would have been better), and a basketball shooting contest where the two people I briefly watched couldn’t even hit the rim from 15 feet. Confident that I could do better, I walked away to avoid personal embarrassment.

The Fair included a performance by the Jesse White Tumbling Team, but so does every other event in Chicago. Next year I think I’ll opt for the Square Roots Music Fest. After all, I was a math major for a while.