Lull-Time Entertainment

We opened our presents early on the morning of December 22, since Yuriko and Ann were off to Japan later that day. Christmas itself passed quietly, though we did prepare a nice dinner. As for New Year’s Eve, Lilly went out with friends — as you should do at 19 — while I stayed home with the dog, a more fitting evening for middle age.

In between those moments, work slacked off, and I enjoyed the lull. Among other things, Lilly and I watched various TV shows when she was home, such as episodes of Frasier (it holds up well) and the newer and considerably different, but also very funny Louie. I also had her watch the “Turkeys Away” episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.

We saw an episode of Bob’s Burgers that involved a gingerbread house contest. Could those really exist? I asked myself later. Yes indeed. Just Google “gingerbread contest” or the like and you get many hits about various events, such as the 2016 National Gingerbread House Competition at the Omni Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC, held just before Thanksgiving.

“It all began with a small group of gingerbread houses built by community members in 1992 as another way to celebrate the holiday season with no plans to continue the following year,” says the competition’s web site. “There was no possible way to know that more than two decades later The Omni Grove Park Inn National Gingerbread House Competition™ would be one of the nation’s most celebrated and competitive holiday events.”

We’ve tried to build those things before. We aren’t dedicated much to the task, so it usually ends up more like a gingerbread trailer park after a tornado.

On the evening before New Year’s Eve, Lilly and I went into the city to see The Christmas Schooner on stage at the Mercury Theater, a mid-sized Chicago venue on the North Side not affiliated with Orson Welles that I know of.

The play is a musical set in the 1880s, involving a German-immigrant ship captain in Manistique, Mich., who hits on the idea of shipping Christmas trees to Germans in Chicago. The trouble is, sailing on Lake Michigan in late November/early December is dangerous, especially in the days of small wooden vessels and no weather reports. Eventually the captain goes down with his ship but his widow and son figure out a way to keep the trade going. The story is a fictionalized account of the real Christmas tree trade between the UP and Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which claimed a number of ships and men, notably the Rouse Simmons, which went down with all hands in Lake Michigan in late 1912.

I’ve long been impressed by the level of talent involved in the Chicago theater, and The Christmas Schooner was no exception. The acting, singing and dancing — or rather, motions on the stage, not a lot of formal dancing — were all first rate. It reminded me that I need to see more live theater in the city, now that the logistics of parenthood isn’t quite as complicated as it used to be.

Greater Tuna at Ford’s Theatre

Will Reagan-era Washington DC ever evoke the kind of nostalgia New York of various decades does, or London of the ’60s, or the once-removed nostalgia for Paris or Berlin of the ’20s? The Americans doesn’t really trade on nostalgia for the time, even though it’s set then. Who knows?

All I know is that I visited DC a number of times during the mid-1980s. During a late ’86 visit, I went to Ford’s Theatre for a performance of Greater Tuna.

FordsTheatreI don’t remember a lot about Greater Tuna, except that it was a somewhat dark, two-man farce about a fictional small town in Texas. According to Samuel French, which licenses the play, Greater Tuna was originally produced in 1981 in Austin by its authors, Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard. The play’s stars, Williams and Sears, played all 20 characters, and Howard directed.

Greater Tuna was first presented Off Broadway at Circle in the Square in New York City on October 21, 1982. It ran for over a year Off Broadway, and “went on to tour major theatres all over America and spots overseas for the next 30 some years, and became one of the most produced plays in American theatre history,” notes Samuel French.

I think Joe Sears and Jaston Williams were still the two men doing all the parts in 1986, but I wouldn’t swear to it. All I have left is a ticket stub and a recollection of it being entertaining.

Ford’s Theatre, of course, has a doleful history of its own. The president’s box is still draped with flags, though it’s actually a 1960s reconstruction of the original, as is the entire theater space, with more changes made in a 2008 renovation. During the most recent renovation, the Washington Post ran an article containing a brief history of the place:

“Ford’s Theatre was a Baptist church until it was taken over in 1861 by entrepreneur John T. Ford. The venue was destroyed by fire the night of Dec. 30, 1862, but was rebuilt and reopened in 1863.

“After the assassination… when Ford sought to reopen for business, there was a public outcry. The government bought the theater from Ford and used it over the years as a museum and as an office and storage building.

“On the morning of June 9, 1893, the building was packed with 500 government clerks, occupying several floors of jury-rigged office space, when the interior collapsed, according to a Washington Post account the next day. Scores were killed and injured, and the theater’s already altered interior was destroyed.

The government rebuilt it again — and again used the building for storage. In the 1950s, the government decided to restore the building as a historic site and theater venue, and Ford’s reopened in 1968.”

It just occurred to me that I’ve visited three of the four sites of presidential assassinations: Ford’s Theatre, the National Gallery of Art’s West Building (built on the site of Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station where President Garfield was shot, though unmarked), and the Texas School Book Depository building. Guess that means I need to visit Buffalo.

Busy June Weekend 1989

Cubs89I have evidence that I went to a Major League Baseball game 26 years ago, and the next day saw a famed Broadway musical on tour in Chicago, at a famed venue. But I can’t really drag much of either experience out of the twisty byways of memory when I think about them now. I can make some logical reconstructions, though.

I went to one or maybe two Cubs games a year in the late 1980s at Wrigley Field, and one Sox game at the old Comiskey Park. Each time I went with some PR people that I knew. Enjoyable, and I’m glad that I got to go, especially to Comiskey, since it was demolished in 1991.

Still, I have no particular memory of the June 10, 1989 game. Data about the game is easy enough to look up, though. The Cardinals took it 6-0 and the game lasted about two and a half hours starting at 3:05 pm (night games, played at Wrigley since August 8, 1988, were still pretty rare). The temp at the start time was 62 F. and it was windy. One of those annoying early June days in Chicago when it isn’t quite as warm as June should be. We had a few of those last week.

Joe Magrane pitched for the Cardinals and Greg Maddux and others pitched for the Cubs. I was one of more than 38,000 in attendance. I probably ate a hot dog and drank a beer, but not even the most insanely complete compilation of baseball stats can tell me for sure.

The ticket, Terrace Aisle 235, Row 13, Seat 101, cost all of $7. In current money, that’s $13.36, according to the handy BLS CPI inflation calculator. So I checked the official ticketing site of the Cubs today to look up an equivalent game and its ticket prices — June 13, 2015, when the Cubs are playing the Reds. It’s too much trouble to pin down the exact current price for that specific seat, but no need to anyway. All of the Terrace Reserved seats range from $41 to $59. What’s your excuse, MLB?

The next day I went to the splendid Auditorium Theatre for a matinee of Les Miserables. My girlfriend at the time wanted to go, so I took her. I remember bits and pieces of some remarkable stagecraft — barricades, seems like — but not much else besides a feeling of not caring for it all that much. Tickets were $30, which is the equivalent of $57.24 now, up in the balcony.

LesMes89It’s a little harder to make a direct comparison to today’s prices, since Les Miserables isn’t playing at the Auditorium Theatre in 2015. Currently the Royal Ballet is doing Don Quixote there; tickets range from about $36 to $146 for the matinee on the 14th. The cheap seats are of course in the balcony, and at a discount to 1989, but then again, I suspect a big-deal Broadway show like Les Mis would command the same, and probably more, than back then. Just a hunch.

Over the years I’ve discovered that big-deal Broadway musicals aren’t really to my taste. Les Mis was probably part of that discovery. I’d rather see a regular play in a small theater. I’m pretty much in agreement with the reviewer Tom Boeker, who wrote in The Reader in 1989: “At last, two years after it opened in New York, it’s come to Chicago. It’s an event, a spectacle, a dress occasion, an opera, and a musical. It’s Les Miserables!

“I don’t know. I don’t get it… So you can see Les Miserables has everything: sentiment, revolution, and romance with a capital R for Romanticism. If you were going to see only one musical in your life, you might as well see this one and get the bloody thing over with. To inflate a quote from the film short Hardware Wars, ‘You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll kiss 40 bucks good-bye.’ “

Execution of Justice

Execution of Justice was the first play I saw in Chicago after moving here in 1987. I’d seen a number of plays in the city before, such as Vicious, Rap Master Ronnie, and All My Sons, because it was a good thing to do when visiting town. Chicago’s got first-rate theater. Once I came to live there, I went to the theater every other month or so.

ExJustice87The play, by Emily Mann, is about the trial of Dan White, assassin of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and the reaction to his absurdly light sentence. White had been in the news again not too much earlier, in late 1985, for committing suicide.

The “Twinkie defense” was part of the play, but I don’t remember if it was treated as the myth it is or not. As Scopes puts it, “better to believe the jury was hoodwinked by some pseudo-scientific nonsense about junk food than to acknowledge the fact that our legal system sometimes absolves defendants of responsibility for the most heinous of crimes.”

I best remember the depiction of the White Night riots, with a dark, quiet stage suddenly exploding with light and noise and the motion of actors. You could tell the audience was startled.