In past years, an overflowing crowd, limited by barriers, would come on a Monday evening, so chosen, I suppose, because Broadway is generally dark on Mondays and the performers could fly in from New York in the morning, rehearse, do the show, and be back at their jobs on Tuesday, which, in some cases, who knows, might have been as singing waitstaff at Ellen’s Stardust Diner (love that place).

But, unless your name is Bruce Springsteen, your Broadway (or even off-off-Broadway) show hasn’t opened yet, so you can play the Pritzker Pavilion on Friday and Saturday night and not miss any time from work.

This also means that you can concentrate more on the Chicago performance, unless you’re still trying to memorize the menu from Ellen’s. It seemed to me that the performers, always in fine voice, were more engaged with their characters than in past years. Even the guest conductor, Lawrence Loh, pulled down his mask to chip in a few lines in one of the songs, to the great amusement of the crowd.

As readers may recall, my history of seeing (or not seeing) Betty Buckley is somewhat checkered, but Mamie Parris played Grizabella in the revival of Cats, so seeing and hearing her sing Memory last night can finally put that chapter to rest, unless Buckley breaks a dinner date with me.

The program said “Blow, Fly, Pop!!’s orchestration is unlike any other. “ That, my friends, is truth in advertising. It looked like a kids’ party (sans scary clown) gone terribly wrong, with the string section starting the piece by waving plastic pencil boards through the air.

And yet, though the sound of the gym ball being thumped didn’t have quite the gravitas of that of a bass drum, and the third balloon the percussionist popped was out of tune (perhaps suffering from an inflation problem, like the economy), the selection wasn’t terrible.

So I got over any disappointment that the piece was not, as I had wrongly anticipated from a too quick reading of the website, “Pop the Cherry” by Blowfly.

The evening moved from a selection reminiscent of minors to two classical pieces in minor keys, Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (New World Symphony), which is familiar to movie fans, perhaps for its use in films like Clear and Present Danger and The Departed, but more likely for its place in Killer Tomatoes Eat France!, the fourth sequel to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

Part of the crowd started leaving during a fine rendition of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. (I stayed all the way through the Finnish.) Their departure would have been understandable earlier in the evening during Brouwer’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, which was forgettable, hopefully.

It wasn’t raining. Three different weather services told me so. And yet, I and the other attendees were getting wet.

What I hadn’t taken into account was the definition of rain.

Rain is composed of water drops with diameters greater than 0.02 inches (.5 mm), whereas drizzle is defined as water drops with diameters less than 0.02 inches. Who knew. I didn’t have anything with me to measure the drops, in either the metric or imperial system, but they apparently didn’t rise to the necessary level to be predicted by any local or national bureaus.

So It didn’t rain. It drizzled. But I still got wet.

Once again I skipped the first half of the concert, and the correctness of my decision was supported by others telling me upon my arrival that what I had missed had been “painfully awful.“ Then they left.

No matter. I then had the pleasure of listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. Unfortunately I also had the displeasure of listening to Beethoven’s biggest fan, an obnoxious guy, with the lungs of an opera singer, sitting a few rows behind me.

Mr. X, as I will call him, apparently was a drop-in (and, I’m guessing, a dropout) who didn’t know ahead of time what the program was, as suggested by his war whoop, ala an over-served soccer (excuse me, football) hooligan who was far less civilized than the Geico Neanderthal-like cavemen who were offended by their characterization in the 2004 commercials, when the conductor introduced the piece and then again after the first movement.

I then quickly moved to the other side of the seating bowl, as I fully expected him to shout out “let’s get ready to rumble” before the next movement started, which might make sense at the next concert, given that the program includes three dance episodes by Leonard Bernstein, albeit not from West Side Story, but rather On the Town, (the play, not the movie, so I will be able to visualize real dancers, not Frank Sinatra).

I timed it perfectly to arrive at a seat just as the chorus was departing its upstage loft after the first piece, as I saw no reason to have their voices interfere with the pleasure of listening to the symphony, just as I don’t like it when people in the theater talk during a performance.

I did get to see that the departing singers were masked, though not in the style of those on the television show, such as Nick Lachey as the winner Piglet in the recent finale, and probably not, unfortunately for the purpose of muting their voices like one of the brass players, whose current “normal’ placement on stage is in the same loft, so that they won’t spew viral particles on the rest of the orchestra.

I still got to listen to Barber and Brahms, without a hint of rain or the siren accompaniments of two days earlier, replaced this time by the off-key sound of overhead helicopters, and also without the hint of a cicada chorus, Chicago seemingly having been spared this year despite the fact that we have reached, per Climate Central, the necessary ground temperature and rainfall to cue their emergence.

On the way home I saw a sign for a psychic, with walk-ins welcome, and considered it for a moment, but, after peeking in the doorway, I dismissed it as a scam, as a real psychic would know that no one would want to climb two flights of steep stairs for a reading.