"Down & Dirty Romeo and Juliet" ~ Upcoming Play-Type Thing

When I was the Shattered Globe Theater, there was a flyer for an upcoming performance piece thing called "Down & Dirty Romeo and Juliet", which sounded incredibly cool.

"Experience the Bard as the groundlings did, immediate, visceral, in your face. All the actors know their lines but which one of them will get to play the part?"


I really want to try and see this.  The ad said that the performance will be in bars and will change venue from night to night.  Also, the audience will get to pick which actor plays which part at the beginning of the play.  It starts in March, so I'll post if I end up seeing it.

~ Beth

Beauty Queen of Leenane ~ Shattered Globe Theater

On Sunday, I went with some people from work to see a play at the Shattered Globe Theater called the Beauty Queen of Leenane.  The play itself is in a smaller theater on the second floor called the Athenaeum Theater.  Our tickets were in the front row and were pretty much on the stage, which made everything seem more real.  They purposefully made the set smaller, more enclosed, and cluttered to give the audience a feeling of a claustrophobia.  Adding to this, the play all took place in the same setting, so the scenery never changed.  It was very visually interesting, with many window panes nailed together in an overlapping pattern, and with old fashioned fixtures and decorations (think poor and early 20th century).  I was impressed that even the sink worked.

The acting was riveting and drew you into the performance.  You could never tell that the actor wasn't their character.  I was surprised to find at the end of the play that none of the actors had Irish accents.  In one scene where a character is burned with hot oil, you could really feel her pain and the entire audience collectively winced, even though you were aware that in reality the oil was cold.  I think that the acting was the most impressive part of the production.

The play itself was a fascinating dark comedy.  I usually get bored in movies and performances, even when I like them, but for this, I was with them the whole time.  The main plot revolved around the relationship of an Irish mother and daughter, and the resentment that can build up when a family member must be a long term care giver without having a life of their own.  It also includes elements of insanity and madness, the desperation of having to emigrate for employment, ostracism due to said emigration, and the loneliness and isolation that can occur due to aging and long term illness.  I would recommend it to anyone with a dark sense of humor looking for something to do.

The only thing I didn't like was that it was a little awkward to watch with some members of our group due to their life situations, but this couldn't be helped.  Think about it twice before you go with someone elderly in your care (it can be a little awkward depending on your relationship).

http://www.shatteredglobe.org/index.html
http://www.shatteredglobe.org/current_production.html

~Beth

Goodbyes at the Parrot

So last night a bunch of co workers and I got together to send off our friend Toc, who is getting a new job.  I've never been to the parrot, but it seemed pretty cool.   It could have just been because we can make up a party anywhere.  Getting to the back chill area was like going through a maze a little bit, and fruity vodka shot were only 4$ (and tasty).  We had a great time, probably scaring everyone in the bar, and somehow got into a "who can pick up who" contest (this happens to me from time to time).  Steve got a great picture of me picking up Jim (another of our partners in crime who will frequently go out with us).  Steve also did his greatest dancing feat yet: dodge rolling over 2 people, and everyone went nuts.

~Beth

Fruit Sushi - Frushi!

Today, Steve, Ashley and I went to this nearby restaurant called Orange on Clark and Fullerton.  They have these awesomely delicious things called Frushi, which is basically fruit sushi.  We got lime infused rice with pineapple in the center and coconut infused rice nigiri with green apple on time, both drizzled in orange and strawberry sauce. I thought the lime one was really delicious.  I hope next time we go back, they have a strawberry or mango one.

Ashley's sushi from the other day.  I was too busy eating
to take a picture of the ones we got today.

~Beth

Gizmo's broken cat hip

While I was moving around this summer, my cats had to live in the suburbs with my parents for a month.  Somehow, by the end of the month when it was time to pick them up, the significantly more clueless one Gizmo had broken his hip without anyone knowing how.  When the vet went in to fix it, I got some cool x-rays of the process.  What they had to do was, since it broke at the ball and socket joint and snapped, they shaved down the connection at the leg bone and took out the broken ball in the joint.  Then, since he's a cat and cats are awesome, a new one just grew in its place out of cartilage somehow.

This is the broken X-ray, you can tell the top hip is broken because there's more overlap of the bone than on the bottom.

Here's after, where you can see that the ball has been removed and now there's just a gap where the bone was.

Gizmo with his stitched up hip and torture cone

"Normal" Gizmo

~Beth

Snowpocalypse 2011

As everyone probably knows, there was a blizzard of epic proportions on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.  For a while overnight, snow was falling at 4 inches an hour (I think we got about 20 inches total).  There was even thundersnow.  We're located in Chicago, so it was a pretty big deal here.  Steve and I heard there were supposed to be 20-25 feet waves on the lake, so naturally we wanted to see for ourselves instead of staying warm at my apartment watching the Colbert Report.  We first tried to get out and see around 7:30PM on Tuesday, but visibility was very low.  We got to the bike path around Barry (on the north side of Chicago) and across the parking lot there, but we were getting hit with wind so hard we could barely keep our eyes open.  I almost got knocked over several times and my eyelashes started freezing in clumps.  It was practically white out conditions and suddenly a row of trees popped up about ten feet in front of us.  It was a little scary considering how close we were to the lake (maybe 20-30 feet away) that we couldn't see it at all. 

 We had a lovely chat with another adventure seeker.  He had made it up to the edge of the concrete steps/barrier around the lake (no beach in this spot) and was wearing ski goggles, and you still couldn't see anything.  The howling of the wind and the crashing of the waves was really loud though.

Ready for a snowy adventure

We hung out with a work friend for a few hours and then had another decision to make around 1am.  We could split up and go home to bed, or we could take another stab at going to see the waves crashing around the lake.  Of course, we decided to try to walk down to Fullerton beach.  Being outside in the middle of a blizzard was beautiful and exciting.  We were dressed really warmly, so that wasn't a problem, and as long as we weren't passing East/West roads (wind coming off the lake), the wind wasn't terrible.  We traipsed about clark street, singing an improv song about Thundersnow and marveling at the weather.  Trudging through snow is hard work, and it was easy to get out of breath, especially for someone with short little legs like me.

Here's the same car on Broadway near Oakdale, the one on the right is without flash, and the one on the left has it.

This is the intersection of Clark/Broadway and Diversey.

We got down to Fullerton, where the wind coming off the lake was really bad.  I noticed a lot of fire trucks and ambulances going by, and figured roads must be really bad with lots of accidents.  Going one block down Fullerton was the worst, where we noticed a cop car sitting near the entrance of the road to the beach.  We figured we couldn't get in to that area, so we turned south and aimed for the Armitage bridge over Lake Shore Drive, figuring it would give us a high point near the lake to view the water from.  We had to put on sunglasses at this point to not be blinded by the snow and wind, which wasn't that much better.  Steve tried to take a video of me, but you can't hear anything even though I'm only a few feet away.  We encountered a few stalled out buses later on, stuck in the snow.  One had slid into a parked car.

On our way home, we noticed that a man was inside, even though the lights were off.  We stopped and talked to him a little, and he said that he had to sit with the bus until a tow truck came.  This was at 2am, and he had been waiting there since around 9:30 pm (when he was supposed to be done with work).  He was very nice though, and offered to let us sit on the bus for a while and warm up.

We kept walking, past this tunnel under sheridan getting snowed in. It took us maybe about an hour and a half to walk from Oakdale to armitage, which is at least twice as long as it usually takes.  Around the LPZoo it started getting freaky windy again (it was moderately windy the whole time, but this was windy enough that it started feeling unsafe).  The wind was strong enough that it almost blew me over.  We made it into the stone structure on the south side of the zoo (the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial) and took shelter here, after walking through some snow drifts higher than my knees and then across a patch of ice where all the snow had been blown off.  (The wind almost blew me across the ice).

(Picture not by me)  This is about 400 ft from LSD, and it was hard to make out the cars on the road, to say nothing of the lake.  We looked out diagonally through those archways while being shielded from the wind.  We never made it any further than this, as it seemed dangerous enough, it was hard to stand in the wind, let alone walk, and the bridge swayed pretty easily from car traffic, not counting 70 mph wind.

Across a small pond by the Zoo is LSD, obscured by snow

While looking out at LSD, I noticed that something was flickering on the road.  At first I thought it was waves, but then I realized it was headlights flickering in the wind.  I don't have a TV (just internet), so I hadn't heard cars were trapped on the road until then.  It was kind of a freaky moment.  I wanted to help, but I couldn't think of any way to do so.  

Zoomed in, it was hard to get a steady shot with the wind.
You can tell the orange light is a CTA bus.  This is at 2:30 am.

We made our way back to Fullerton, stopping to ask the cops in the car that we had previously seen if we could help at all.  They just responded by saying "Got a shovel?" and saying there really wasn't much we could do.  So we continued until we got to our respective homes (around 3:30), where we warmed up and I got a call 2 1/2 hours later to come into work to help (I work at a retirement home) since many other workers were snowed in.

Sad, buried moped on Oakdale

~Beth