Our Little Vacation in Chicago
Al and I took the weekend off for some much-needed adventure after our last relocation of home and hearth. We ventured to the Greater Chicago area, situating ultimately in a Schaumburg hotel room which we got at a super cut rate deal – it was a Wyndham, very nice. But first I made my way to the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, which is the main archive/museum for the BGEA (Billy Graham Evangelistic Associates). I’d learned long ago that they’d some holdings on Homer Rodeheaver and Billy Sunday, so off to work I went.
My wife sat down at a table and went right to sleep while I copied down matrices from records, read old scrapbooks of newspaper clippings relating to the Sunday campaigns, and reeled through microforms. I learned a LOT – it would be hard not to, as that archive is about the quietest place on earth. There was even another researcher there and it was still as quiet as a morgue.
From Wheaton to Schaumburg, and our hotel room. After a bite at Red Robin we were both exhausted, so we took an hour or so nap. Then we went off to the very tip of northern Chicago, near Skokie, to meet up with a friend of Allisyn’s. She lives with her nice Jewish family and we sat down to a splendid meal of enchiladas made Jewish/American style. These were really sweet folks – while Allisyn chatted with her friend I ended up spending the time with mom and dad, both near 70, but that was okay. In my errant youth I went to a Jewish school and going to dinner to with a Jewish family was like coming home again, in a way.
Then, after "not staying nearly long enough," we headed out towards downtown to see Kristina Wong at the Athenaeum Theater. I was so excited as I was finally to meet the person with whom I have been corresponding, off and on, for more than a year. We found the theater; parked, got the tickets left for us at the front desk, and took the elevator up to the third floor where she was appearing.
I’d gotten the time wrong, and we discovered that we had arrived an hour before the show was to start. As I was standing there blubbering, a voice comes from behind – "are you David?" It’s Kristina, who throws her arms around me for a big hug, and it’s like I’m being electrocuted because I haven’t gotten my puny brain around the fact that here she is, standing in front of me, and now I’m getting a hug. I couldn’t be natural – I’m sure I was straight as a board. It was so exciting for me, but I was, as usual, mentally unprepared.
My Entex had worn off and I was deaf as a post, due to persistent congestion with which I have suffered most of the summer long. We were out in the hallway, which has tall ceilings and is very boomy, and there is a performance in progress already. We’re all trying to whisper and I can’t understand a word. Kristina takes her place down on the sofa and rests a bit, and Allisyn and I twiddle our thumbs, get cokes from a machine, stand outside and smoke cigarettes – anything to kill an hour. We spend some time trying to chat with Rachel Rudanski, who is the self-described "caretaker" of the place, originally from Texas, very bright, attractive and charming. At one point Kristina is napping with her arms raised up in the air – she has very slender, beautiful arms and large, but graceful hands, like those of a pianist.
We were all concerned about the turnout, as there was absolutely no one in the house when we arrived. By the time we got back from our last smoke break there was a crowd gathering in the lobby. When the seating was finished there was a respectable and lively audience – some Asian girls call out "We love you Kristina!! Woo-ooh!!" even before the show began.
Kristina Wong’s performance, more than an hour long, was a sensation. It’s been a long time since anything I have seen has made me laugh harder, made me feel a tense beat more strongly, or reached such depths of expression, peril, dismay and climaxes of triumph as what Kristina was able to pull off last Saturday. I’m not going to recount ANY of her performance directly, as you should see the truth of what I say for yourself. But I’m the kind of guy that can hear a bad fourth-chair horn note in a symphony performance, or pick out a bad edit in a movie I’ve never seen, or spot a continuity lapse in some picture even the script girl missed. That’s why I guess I make my living as a critic. But if Kristina Wong did anything that was less than perfectly portrayed, totally engaging and meaningful that night, I didn’t catch it. Kristina thinks that the crowd doesn’t like her, or something’s not going over, when they’re quiet, but the fact of the matter is that the crowd was hanging on her every word and gesture – she had them in the palm of her hand. She has beautiful eyes, confident and sparkling but also a bit sad, from which you still get a little sizzle of electricity even when they are mostly closed.
Afterward we went to a pizza parlor and sat at a table with a bunch of people, one being Kristina Wong, several others being the aforementioned Rachel, Allisyn, and many folks I didn’t know and really didn’t meet. My hearing still sucked, and all I could really do was babble about how terrific the show was and indulge in the "Uncle Dave in overdrive" type conversation that’s so deep no one gets it anyway. But Allisyn, as always, saved the day by being charming, funny and very comfortable. Don’t invite me to your party: I just sound like I’m giving notes for a lecture. Invite Allisyn instead.
The next day I went to Tower Records in Schaumburg – the first time I’d set foot in a Tower in six years, although I devoted many years of my life to that company. I couldn’t find anything that I really wanted, but I settled on a disc of some C.P.E. Bach symphonies led by Gustav Leonhardt and the new remastered version of "The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 1" on Blue Note – they were on sale. I see that this Tower has adopted the floor plan I innovated in Woodland Hills, where the Jazz, World, Blues and New Age sections move into the same room with Classical. Then I took Allisyn out for lunch at Todai, which is an all you can eat sushi bar. When she’d eaten her fill, she said, "I wish I had a second stomach."
We were caught in a miserable traffic jam just outside of Chicago, occasioned by a wreck on the freeway. So it took forever for us to reach our home still piled up in boxes and chaos. But this was a great vacation, we had a splendid time, I didn’t have to give any talks or attend papers or chew the fat with people who are interested in where I work. It was the only real vacation we got all year, and it was swell.
Uncle Dave Lewis
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