Thursday, August 18, 2011.
Hours Of Paintings. Lunch In Little Italy. Peter Pan.
Out to breakfast while Mary Leigh slept on. The restaurant in the Allegro Hotel in Chicago is called 312. Why do restaurants persist with these unmemorable numbers instead of names? But the place was good-looking and snappily served. At lunch and dinner, it's a contemporary Italian restaurant with an intriguing menu. However, nothing on the card would have even the slightest appeal to Mary Leigh, even though she had it in her mind that today would feature an Italian meal. She is thinking chicken parmigiana, not cappesante griglia con asperagi.
She slept on just long enough for me not only to have a plate of fruit and pastries with juice and coffee, but to write and publish my newsletter. (It helped that I was a little ahead of the latter game.) As soon as she was ready to head out into the Second City, so was I.
Our main goal today was the Art Institute of Chicago. It's both a museum and a school, and has in its inventory over 300,000 works. Chicago is full of great museums, and this is the only one of its major institutions I've never visited. Mary Leigh--an art student--is as interested in visual arts as I am in food. We spent three hours walking around the galleries. After an hour it was clear that we would not be able to do this place justice in only a day, and planned to return.
The tour got off to a bad start. The featured exhibit collected popular art from the other side in World War II. Some of it was graphic and gory. Very disturbing, especially to ML. But from then on it was one amazing room after another, until we were too tired to go on.
Lunchtime. We were happy to discover that Rosebud was open all afternoon. Rosebud is one of the older restaurants in Little Italy, and its menu was exactly what ML had in mind. The Eat Club had dined at Mia Francesca on the other end of the block on both our previous visits, but many Chicagoans told me that if I liked that (and I did), I'd love Rosebud.
All the pieces were there: semi-darkness, red napkins, Sinatra and Tony Bennett, hundreds of photos of well-known Italians, an enormous menu with all the marinara, alfredo, and aglio olio one's heart desires, low prices, a waitress with a bit of a lip on her.
And portions of such tremendous size that even though neither of us finished our meals, we both felt bloated the rest of the day.
I started with a bowl of Italian wedding soup--a big bowl. Then rotini carbonara. Mary Leigh's pile consisted of what in any other restaurant would be two orders of chicken parmigiana. She couldn't finish one of them. It was one of those places.
I re-learned that the spumone at Angelo Brocato's is a) different from spumone anywhere else (Rosebud's was chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry) and 2) better than any other.
We had a cab carry us back to the hotel for a rest before the evening's entertainments. A production of Peter Pan was the only major theatre going on in this slack time of the year. Mary Leigh didn't take this as a kid show, I was happy to know.
We were a little surprised that it was presented in a tent in a parking lot next to the Chicago Tribune's big facility on the Chicago River. But the play itself was breathtaking. The inside of the tent was used as a screen for a 360-degree projection. Everything else was done in the round, too. Our seats were right in back of the vacant front row, with the stage just below our eye level. We couldn't have had a better vantage point.
There is no way flying children could have been more effectively portrayed in live theatre. At one point five characters were in the air. How did their wires not get tangled? The projections on the inside of the tent made us feel as if we were flying right behind.
On the solid stage, the actors needed and had gymnastic abilities to keep up the choreography. I was especially impressed by the lady who played the Indian girl. She was not only an eyeful, but seemed just short of being able to fly without need for wires. It was all brilliant. Mary Leigh couldn't have been more impressed. Dads don't make many scores like this with teenagers.
The only problem was the location. Apparently the cab companies weren't aware that a play was going on here. It took a long time to get a taxi back to the hotel, and then we had to share one with some other folks. Too far to walk, and I don't know the buses.
Rosebud. Chicago: 1500 W Taylor St. 312-942-1117.
