Archives for June 9, 2008

On Wednesday I dined in suburban Chicago with Mrs. T, Our Girl, CAAF, and Mr. CAAF, after which we all saw the wonderful Writers’ Theatre production of The Lion in Winter that I reviewed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column. It wasn’t easy getting from downtown Chicago to Glencoe, and we barely arrived at the restaurant in time for a hasty meal, so the five of us went out after the show for dessert and conversation. To our collective amazement, we saw a De Lorean DMC-12 in the parking lot of Restaurant No. 2, and clustered around it like small children in the presence of Santa Claus.
Laura and Hilary (to call them by their real-world names) are old buddies. Not so OGIC and CAAF. Even though my co-bloggers have “known” one another for some time and have been sharing this space for nearly a year, they’d never met in person or spoken on the phone prior to last Wednesday. I’ll leave it to them to tell you how it felt to meet for the first time. Suffice it for now to say that I enjoyed watching their faces light up as each found out at last what the other looked and sounded like.
Carrie and her Lowell departed for points north the following morning, so I took Mrs. T to the Art Institute of Chicago. It was her first visit to that storied collection, and I regret to say that it was ill-timed, for the Art Institute is currently in the process of building a new wing to house its collection of modern art. No doubt it will be glorious, but a good-sized chunk of the permanent collection, including such favorites of mine as the museum’s superb group of Joseph Cornell boxes, has been put in storage until the modern wing opens its doors next spring. I’d also hoped to show Hilary my all-time favorite painting by John Singer Sargent, “Study from Life (Egyptian Girl),” but it, too, was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, the Art Institute is big enough to be worth seeing even in the semi-chaotic state to which it has lately been reduced, and the curators have taken care to ensure that all of its most celebrated paintings, including Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884,” Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” can be found and viewed with comparative ease.
I was especially pleased to be able to lead Mrs. T straight to John Twachtman’s Icebound. I’ve mentioned Twachtman in this space on occasion–I own one of his etchings–but for the most part he is known only to connoisseurs of American impressionism, of which he was in my opinion the greatest and most individual exponent. “Icebound” is one of several wintertime landscapes by Twachtman, and it may well be the best one, though Winter Harmony is a close contender.
We saw two more plays with Our Girl, The Comedy of Errors at Chicago Shakespeare and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey at Shattered Globe Theatre. The second we saw at a disadvantage–the air conditioning was out of order–but the stalwart actors gave every sign of being unfazed by the soaring temperatures in the tiny, oven-like upstairs theater, and the three of us did our best to respond accordingly. (It wasn’t hard.) We also ate a smashing dinner at Osteria Via Stato, which might just be my favorite restaurant in Chicagoland, though Hot Doug’s comes pretty damn close.
On Sunday Mrs. T and I flew down to St. Louis and drove south from there to Smalltown, U.S.A., where we’ll be spending the next few days with my family. Don’t expect to hear much more from me until Friday, when we return to New York–briefly–before resuming our theater-related travels.
Till then, keep cool!

While looking at them

have we prolonged the

life of flowers?

Haiku inscribed on Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Morning Glories” (Art Institute of Chicago)