Back From Chicago:

I’m home: The Midwest Literary Festival is a charming festival in its third year, clearly with a lot of community goodwill. I had a great time at it but when asked how was my trip, I have to say, as Sinatra would have “Two shots of happy. One shot of sad.”

Sad:

*Hot: Had to be 95 degrees in Illinois that weekend. I come from a cold foggy part of the world now. Not used to this.

*Aurora: Way way further away from Chicago than I thought. Saturday night, I took the last train back and got stuck with a gang of Rolling Stones fans just out of a concert. I did not want to participate in the “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” singalong at 2 AM. No, I did not.

*Laptop: My laptop hard drive decided to fail on the plane ride over. Justin and I wasted half of Saturday afternoon at the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue trying to get it fixed, only to find out it was toast.

*Timing: I couldn’t have picked a worse weekend to come to town as almost all of my Chicagoland friends were either out of town, out of the country, or indisposed.

Happy:

*Festival. Much fun, nice people. Got to meet Melanie Lynn Hauser whom I know from Readerville and is lovely.

*Lunch with Julie Shapiro, director of the Third Coast Audio Festival, at the divine Lula Cafe. Julie is like a long lost cousin. We hit it of before we ever met.

*Seeing Justin, my college roommate and friend of 14 years.

*Benefiting from his theater expertise. Justin reviews theater for Chicagoist and is something of a local expert. Chicago being the greatest theater town in America, I try and take in a show when I’m town. Or 4.

This time around, we saw Daredevils, the new show by the Neo-Futurists. The Neo-Futurists are one of the most beloved troupes in town thanks to Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a show where they do 30 plays in sixty minutes as selected by the audience who yells out their names of a “Play Menu.”

Daredevils is a loony meditation on why men do stupid things in the name of a rush. It’s one of the few plays I’ve seen where the actors ride tricycles up steep ramps and walk barefoot across glass.

Joy good fun and highly recommended. One super entertaining night at the theater.

Also saw Soundtrack City Chicago, a solo show by beatbox artist Yuri Lane, who I had seen perform once in San Francisco. Yuri plays 10 characters, all through sounds created in his throat. Think Eric Bogosian meets Kid Beyond. Each character illustrates something about contemporary Chicago, a city still kinda affordable for artists and freaky people, but gentifying quickly, a city with generations of families in the same neighborhoods but being circles like sharks by developers.

Short, powerful and way entertaining. Unlike anything you’ve quite seen before. See it post haste.

• Category: On the road...