(NOTE: See an update in the comment thread, as well as a link to my blog about another recent time Mayor Daley sold out Chicago commuters for a film shoot–that time in 8-degree weather…)

Where is the civic pride in accepting money from a Hollywood production company to film a movie that will glorify the destruction of your city’s downtown and the death of many of its rank-and-file citizens? This is not a rhetorical question, it’s one I’d love to ask the Daley administration since this summer, several major Chicago Loop and West Loop streets have been cordoned off and given over to the Transformers 3 movie shoot.

Sure, Chicago’s budget has lately teetered on the edge of the abyss, and director Michael Bay and star Shia LeBeouf could just as easily be setting siege to midtown Manhattan right now instead of forking over $20 million for the right to disrupt Chicago’s pedestrian, automobile, and bus transit traffic every weekend from now until Auguat 23. Is that the going rate to cede all control over how your city is portrayed by major media? Twenty million in exchange for letting a movie studio make money off of images of a destroyed LaSalle Street littered with the bodies of dead Chicago office workers, shoppers, and visitors?

Yes, according to local news media, which have been fawning over the shoot since it began last weekend, not to mention the crowds of locals who flocked to the barriers blocking access to LaSalle, Randolph, and Washington. Hurray, burned-out cars littering a burning, apocalyptic streetscape! Yippee, screaming hordes of terrified extras running for their lives!

This is obviously not your father’s Blues Brothers shoot.

Our town’s done a lot to become Hollywood-friendly since the bad old days of Daley-pere when the idea of closing a street to film anything was an anathematic idea. And we sure can use the money. But is this really the way we want to portray Chicago to the world?

As a kid, I loved disaster flicks. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tended to shy away from films where senseless violence is the main attraction, and I’ve seen enough of the Transformers franchise to know how well this film series fits that bill. But I know many, many other people love entertainment like this and they have a right to it, too.

I also know our town’s seen cinematic death and destruction before, though usually as a stand-in for somewhere else. New York in Spiderman 2. Mythical Gotham City in The Dark Knight. But this time, the mayhem will be fully owned–lock, stock, and gory demises–by the City and citizenry of Chicago. Call me old-fashioned, but there’s something about the idea of the Windy City being laid to ruin that makes me feel uneasy.

My reticence to see my fellow Windy Citizens chewed up and spit out by exploding machines has nothing to do with my 9/11 experience, as I’m sure some readers might think. However, I’ll fully admit there may be some sour grapes at work here. If I had a nickel for every weekend that Danny Devito or Helen Hunt had my Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood turned upside-down in the 1990s for a film shoot, I’d be able to afford the old ‘hood again.

Like New York neighborhoods that get hit with frequent movie shoots, Chicago neighborhoods deserve to have their pedestrian access protected and their transit routes unimpeded, too. There are currently half-a-dozen time-wasting reroutes of major east-west CTA buses planned every weekend from now until late August affecting thousands of downtown residents and visitors. Most of them are taking the delays in stride for a chance to see a real-live film shoot. I happen to resent City Hall making money off of the glorified destruction of the city I love and the death of innocent Chicagoans like me and, likely, many people reading this post.

I’m reminded of the episode of Bugs Bunny where Daffy Duck drinks nitro glycerin, swallows a match, and explodes in order to show that he’s the better showman. As he said when his ghost was floating up to waterfowl heaven, “I can only do this trick once.” The same can be said of several other things City Hall has sold-off lately. The Chicago Skyway. Parking meters. Midway Airport (almost.)

Does Mayor Daley have to attach a dollar value to civic self-respect, too? That’s a hard thing to get back once you blow it.

(Photo: Nothing a lake or so of Tinactin won’t clear right up…)

So I took a break from the sturm and total drag of my job search to take in Monday’s Broadway in Chicago concert in Grant Park with Potential Mr. New Guy. Regular readers will ken there’s always a Potential Mr. New Guy. Actually getting to Mr. Steady Guy lately seems an unspeakably tough task–but I digress back to the bottom of things more important to the purposes of this post. Specifically, the unspeakably tough tootsies of a certain surprise guest who shared our lawn sheet with PMNG and me.

I blame Foursquare. Less than a week with the social-checkin game on my Android phone and I’ve already achieved my Oversharing badge. No surprise there. PMNG plays too, and telling the world exactly where we were at that exact moment is exactly how Dermaphrodite Man and boyfriend found us.

“Ooh, I know them. Hi! Over here!” As soon as those words left PMNG’s lips I knew our romantic musical evening was in trouble. Of course, I was the idiot who uttered, “Let’s spread the sheet out wider,” prompting the two third wheels to plop down behind us. No matter where blame should properly be placed, though, there’s was little warning for what was to follow from the friends PMNG hadn’t seen in years.

“Can you put my shoes over there?” Dermaphrodite Man asked his boyfriend. I thought nothing of the request. After all, PMNG and I were already down to our socks. Then I turned around. I did my best to stop the blast-regurgitating Snickerdoodle at my uvula when I saw what laid directly behind me: naked, leathery, cracked, green-toed, life-threatening, Godzilla-riffic, size-12 athlete’s feet.

On my sheet. Next to my sneakers. As near as I can remember, faintly growling. I did my best to draw PMNG’s attention to the terrifyingly toenailed sight, but he was already riffing on our evening’s emcee, ABC 7’s ever-flubbable Janet Davies (and really, who wouldn’t.) So I did the next best thing I could. I texted him.

“Your friend has athlete’s foot. It’s really contagious. I don’t want to tell him but he needs to put his shoes back on.”

I was relieved several minutes later when PMNG’s AT&T-challenged  iPhone finally deigned to vibrate with my message. I watched his eyes ever-so-discreetly scan from screen to feet and back. He shot me the sweetest, “OMG I’m so sorry,” look I’ve ever seen as I waited for him to text me back with our escape plan.

While I waited, the Barbecue Pringles started trying to come up, too, as Dermaphrodite Man started to pick his feet. In earnest. Like he was panning for gold in his elephantine epidermis. I leaned towards PMNG and cupped my hand in a pretend whisper while I demurely pushed the seedless grapes forward with my elbow for all I was worth. Finally, PMNG started typing on his handset. And then–

“Oh crap, my iPhone died.”

At that moment, so did my hopes. With no further method of non-obvious communication, we were forced to ignore the situation and sit through the dreck of Shrek and the agony of Rock of Ages for two hours. Every so often, I’d feel a gentle poke on my buttocks, pee a little in fright, and inch further towards the front of the sheet. But there’s only so far you can go before you’re sitting on wet grass and goose poo.

I tried to concentrate on Wicked’s Wicked and I. I stared blankly forward in my best Burmese meditation pose and intently listened into Hair’s Easy to Be Hard. But all I could think of was the potential for wickedly hard hairy pieces of athletes toejam going flying into my food with every single pick, pick, pick.

I prayed for rain. I texted PMNG’s BFF and begged her to come save us. I used my Android phone as a notepad and passed my handset with the following message on it across the grape gap:

“I’ll get you for this.”

When the concert finally ended, I popped up off the sheet so fast I pulled a muscle. We bid a quick good-bye to Dermaphrodite Man and boyfriend, and PMNG carefully folded up the sheet and sealed it in a plastic bag. Then we headed to Boystown where we ended the evening drinking with the PMNGBFF (did you get all that?) and telling our tale of toenail woe to anyone who would listen.

PMNGG offered a stream of apologies throughout the evening, but none were needed. I know my own capacity for inadvertent mischief all too well. I’m sure that soon enough the shoe will be on the other foot.

Where, God willing, it will stay.

(Image: If a lesbian strips in front of a crowd, will straight men notice?)

I don’t know whether it’s shock value or just another case of Chicago eating its entertainment young, but this year’s Windy City holiday burlesque scene is a bit different than the last. In 2008, I and a few friends (including Pastry Chef Chris) took Gapers Block up on an offer of free tickets for its bloggers to see Land of the Sweets, an innovative–and scantily clad– “Burlesque Nutcracker” show on tour from its native Seattle. (Those were the days when I was writing food & drink posts for GB’s Drive-Thru channel–find links to those posts in my Gapers Block archive.) That show got healthy local media coverge.

This year, a Windy City troupe is putting a hometown take on taking it off for the holidays. Longtime local burlesque troupe, Girlie-Q, began performing its own show, Delight Before Christmas, more than a week ago at Theatre Building Chicago. This time, very little has been picked up in Chitown media about the show, even though it features a slew of noted local and national burlesque and variety performers. (Follow the above links for more on the show, or see my writeup from this week’s Chicagosphere.)

Both shows are madcap, comic musicals that reboot classic holiday themes with edgy, sexy performances. So why haven’t you heard more about the Girlie-Q show? Is it because adult entertainment doesn’t sell in Chicago for the holidays? Or, just maybe, is it because Girlie-Q is an LGBT burlesque troupe?

Girlie-Q founder and artistic director, JT Newman, started the troupe as a way to help both gay and straight audiences realize that everyone can be sexy on the outside–people of all shapes, sizes, and orientations. A leading local blogger on the burlesque arts, Newman was the subject of Chicagosphere’s debut post in May 2009 and, for fullest disclosure, since November 2009 has been a paid public relations client. She and the troupe must be doing something right, because they’ve been pulling in local audiences since 2003.

So what’s with the media reticence? (And said reticence apprears to apply to local LGBT online media, too.) It can’t be because Chicagoans think Christmas is just for the kiddies. Not only was last year’s absolutely adults-only Land of the Sweets a popular ticket, but this year audiences are eating up the equally adult holiday drag show, Snow White and the Drag Queen Who Stole X-Mas, staged by Midtangent Productions at Hydrate in Boystown.

I also doubt it’s due to the Girlie-Q show’s overt sexuality or clothing-optional nature. A week before Thanksgiving, the Chicago Tribune promoted on the front page of its website a photo feature praising the joys of naked tourism. (I kid you not.) So it’s not like local media has gone holiday-imprurient. They know still waters run deep in this down. Let’s face it, we don’t host the International Mister Leather competition here every year for nothing.

And I highly doubt straight men with all their lesbian-centric fantasies I’ve heard tell about on Fox sitcoms and cable talk shows–not to mention all the macho hubris they like to drunkenly shout about into the middle of a Lincoln Park night–wouldn’t jump at the idea to watch a stage full of them take their clothes off. (If you’re a straight guy reading this, tell me you wouldn’t.)

So my big bugbear question of the week is to ask why Chicago media–both straight and gay–who so clearly love to go on and on about heteros taking their clothes off and gay men dressing up as women, have no clue what to do when the ones showing skin up on stage are queer. I thought this city was more adventurous than that, not to mention more open-minded.

But maybe no one told the media.

(Photo: Sometimes movie classics don’t stand up to the test of time.)

The following is cross-posted on my Huffington Post Chicago byline. (Where on 9/22/09 it made it to the national Entertainment page, squee!)

Ever since I became an official Netflix couch potato, I’ve been spending my evenings popping one Hollywood back-catalog movie after another into my nifty new Blu-ray/DVD player. The mail-me-a-movie service is a godsend for ADDers like me. I almost never see first-run films–the idea of sitting quiet and still in a room full of strangers for an hour and forty-five minutes is too much for my restless psyche to bear. The joy of my new-found ability to plop on my futon in the comfort of my own apartment and progressively watch my way through a list of movies any human being should have seen by now tells me Netflix has an untapped market in anyone on drugs starting in Adder- or Rita-.

So I’ve been getting caught up with movies you’ve likely seen before, many times, and/or a long time ago.  I particularly enjoy suspense and horror “classics”. Flip on the original Halloween, the original The Fog, Poltergeist, anything Hitchcock, and I’ll be there with popcorn before you have time to put down the remote. So when I got the Netflix email telling me Roman Polanski’s 1968 mega-hit Rosemary’s Baby was on its way, I was particularly excited. At the time, Roger Ebert gave the film adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1965 devil-worship novel four stars. Movie fans on Rotten Tomatoes rate the film 98% fresh even today. Even one of Marina City’s couch ladies told me how scary a film it was.

So it took a while for me to figure out why I was bored out of my mind watching it last night. All two hours and 16 ponderous minutes of it. This morning I awoke to two reasons wobbling around my noggin. For starters: maybe the shock value of first-of-their-kind movies pales over time?

In his period review, Ebert applauds the way the movie’s persistent telegraphing of a “horrific” and “inevitable” conclusion brings the audience along for a frightening ride. I doubt he’d write the same review today. In 1968, the mere idea of a woman being raped by a creature from hell so that a coven of witches could steal her baby and raise it as the anti-Christ would be inducive of shudders. But forty-one years of graphically violent splatter movies since then have reduced the power of such images to shock much of anyone anymore.

Having seen it all time and again, Polanki’s persistent early plot giveaways just made Rosemary’s Baby seem predictable to me. A groggy woman tied to a bed and pounced on by a figure covered in red scales in the second reel? Yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s giving birth to Satan’s son somewhere before the credits roll–as Rosemary, or course, did, while I waited around another hour for something unexpected to happen. (The same thing happened to me watching 1973’s The Exorcist for the first time in the 1990s–head spinning, green vomit, and subliminal shots of demonic shapes weren’t going to make a Clinton-era cable-watcher rush from his living room in fright the same way they made Nixon-era moviegoers rush from theaters.)

My second noggin-wobbling reason was the real clincher for me, though: maybe you just have to be Christian to really be scared by movies like Rosemary’s Baby (or The Exorcist, for that matter)? And in particular, Roman Catholic?

Whether in 1968 or today, ominous religious ideas like hell, Satan, and demonic possession have the power to give pause to individuals whose personal beliefs give credence to them. The adult Buddhist in me watched these themes flit through Rosemary’s Baby and yawned. Having been raised Catholic, I could clearly understand how as a child I would have been terrified by a move that played upon the religious beliefs that my family believed in. Believing in a wholly different view of the universe today, however, reduced the move to an overly long exercise in camera angles for me, rather than an engaging evening.

While I’m on the subject, why do religious thrillers always seem to revolve around Catholic cosmologies? You can count Jewish, Lutheran, Mulsim, and Buddhist thrillers on one hand, but you can swing a cat and hit a theater showing a movie that features something coming up from hell and dragging off someone holding on to a cross, saying a “Hail Mary”, and praying to a saint for dear life. In a country with a Protestant majority, for that matter. Why is that?

For fullest disclosure, I have a healthy spirituality, have a close relationship with my concept of God, and  respect the multitude of religious traditions that guide the people closest to me and those with whom I share the planet. But I’d pay money to see Hollywood make a horror film that acknowledged a wider religious cosmology than the one blessed in Rome. It can’t just end with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Vesak Terror Train, anyone?

(Photo: During the frigid, fallow months of a Chicago winter, being prepared is more than just a Boy Scout motto…)

With fall almost upon us and (my favorite living local columnist) Mary Schmich no doubt on the verge of her annual verbal dirge about the Windy City’s wrathful winter weather, I can finally officially say: I’m prepared. Three months almost to the day since the first wave of my technological migration, I’m proud to complete my transition to the modern age. Give or take a couple years.

In June, I pared down to a single phone number and email address, dumping years of Vonage echoes and inflexible Apple desktop software for an iPhone- and Google-based lifestyle. I rightly figured doing so would save both aggravation and money, those benefits helping me better concentrate on building my consulting business in the throes of the New Depression.

Happily, the lately brightening economy has brought my client base back out of hiding. Given the late calendar date, it hasn’t happened a moment too soon. I don’t think I could suffer through another long Chicago winter with standard-definition TV.

Not that I’m a weather whiner–frequently during months ending in -ember and -ary I call out particularly plaintive locals for having the audacity to bitch about the cold while donning wispy windbreakers and eschewing woolen wear. Me, I dress for the success of living to see another day when Jack Frost comes calling in these parts.

It’s just that I have a habit of holding onto outdated audio-video technology until my sense of shame at having friends over becomes too much to bear. Feel free to hand me a shiny, new Macbook and iPhone every year. But don’t touch my nine-year-old hi-fi stereo VCR–how else am I supposed to watch my 15-year-old reruns of Maude?

Yes, I know, on YouTube, but that’s not the point. It’s bad enough I’m feeling old at 39. That’s near-deceased in technological terms. Folks just a few years older than me still use phrases like, “information superhighway,” “mix tape,” and “television dial.” I at least know the terminology. Allowing myself to take a really hard look at my entertainment center a couple of weeks ago, though, had me feeling already dead and buried.

Included there in addition to the 2000 VCR: a 1995 receiver and double tape deck, and leftover plastic bits from the malfunctioning remote I tossed at the wall in ‘07, forcing me to get up every time I wanted to change the channel on my standard-definition DirectTV box. Oh, and burying the lead, the 32-inch LCD HDTV I bought last October in a failed effort to force myself to upgrade the aforementioned items.

In my defense, the HDTV replaced the $99 picture-tube 20-inch that I picked up at Circuit City when I moved to Chitown and promptly nursed for the subsequent six, fuzzily pixelated years. Which was fine until Overly Frank bought a top-of-the-line Sony Bravia shortly before Labor Day…

In defense of my dating life–I certainly didn’t expect him to come to my house to watch DVDs on my crummy set-up, would you?–I knew something had to give.

Five-hundred dollars later, what eventually gave, as it turned out, was my wallet. In return, at least for starters, that got me an HDMI cable to convert my backup Macbook into an HDTV-focused media center. Given my recent distaste for Apple-provided software solutions, a few quick Google searches had me downloading the popular Boxee and (Mac-only) Plex media-center applications, to supplement Apple’s annoyingly controlled-access Front Row.

Before long, I was watching my iTunes catalog of Kathy Griffin concerts and streaming old episodes of Mary Tyler More via Hulu. Which was fine until Frank told me about Netflix online movie streaming…

I crossed my fingers that the ancient DVD drive in my old Macbook would still work, signed up (at incredibly long last) for Netflix, and clicked on that little red app box in Boxee. Okay, the streaming movie selection is sucky. But I’ve already spent so many hours streaming entire Britcom series from beginning to end that I upped my DSL pipeline to super-mega-seatbelt speed to ensure AT&T doesn’t cut me off out of spite for not using U-Verse. Which was fine until my first Netflix DVD came…

You should see my Netflix queue. I never go to the movies as it is. I prefer bygone-era comedies and previous-decade blockbusters. Recognizing the chance to bone up on my pop-culture credibility, however, I’ve got one recent blockbuster, Pixar movie, or critically acclaimed hit after another lined up in my queue. Generously padded with 1930s screwball comedies and Hitckcock thrillers, of course. (A tiger doesn’t change its stripes overnight, you know.)

I managed to get Peter Bogdonavich’s Barbra Streisand/Ryan O’Neal farce, What’s Up Doc?, fired up on the old Mac when Frank came calling over the weekend–after about a dozen tries. Monsters, Inc. the next day, not so much. I’m glad Frank wasn’t there to witness the hundred tries that didn’t work. He’d just gone out and bought a Costco-discounted Sony Blu-ray player to go with his HDTV, so my sense of chagrin would have been palpable. Which wouldn’t have been fine and so…

I figured it was about time to visit my local Best Buy anyway. It’s the swanky new one in the Hancock, sagely bereft of major appliances since Michigan Avenue tourists don’t tend to lug washers and dryers home on Southwest. What I ended up lugging home, myself, was a very familiar and fully Cook County-taxed Sony Blu-ray player. But it worked, and that’s all that mattered. Which would have been the end of the story, except…

Dammit, it’s an HDTV I bought last fall, I’m not getting any younger, and for once in my life I’d like to have the same high-definition television experience I originally hawked to high-income The Great Indoors shoppers when I arrived in Chicago six years ago and couldn’t find a job any nearer to civilization than said Sears home-furnishing store. In Schaumburg.

So the rest of said money–and 45 minutes of my life waiting on hold–went to downtown Chicago’s paragon of unreliability, DirecTV reseller MDU Communications, who currently own Marina City’s wiring and “benefit” we Marina Citizens by exclusively offering DirecTV. The bastards fine upstanding resellers made me buy my HD DVR receiver at retail cost. But it’s not like putting Dish Network on my balcony or moving to a building wired for (God forbid) Comcast would have been any cheaper, so I sucked it up.

The late-arriving installer left a few hours ago. I’ve spent the rest of today watching informationally feeble, hi-def documentaries and remembering how liberating it feels to hit the DVR record button on a white plastic remote. Last time I had a DVR–albeit briefly–I was 33-years-old, and used it to learn how to cook by recording all hell out of the Food Network. This time, I’m thinking, numerous episodes of something in a nice Niecy Nash…

And there you have it, my journey firmly into TV tech circa 2007. Sure, I’m a bit late to the party, but I’m already having a blast. In fact, I’d catch you up more on recent events, but I’m busy at the moment programming favorite channels and building an industrial strength electric fence with nuclear armament to keep Camões from taking a hike across my media center shelves. (His verboten paws across my old Macbook’s keyboard have changed my hard drive name to “/697*” once already.)

Feel free to check in on me once the thermometer hits 80 again. Yes, I know, it was 80 today, but I can’t be bothered to notice, what with Oprah’s Whitney interview waiting on my DVR, 25 more episodes of As Time Goes By to stream on Netflix, and the entire William Powell/Myrna Loy 1930s screwball Thin Man series lined up in my delivery queue.

It’s a good thing I like to choose my own produce, or I might sign up for Peapod and never again make it down from the 38th floor. Or off my futon, for that matter. Or even out from under my blanket.

Do me a favor and turn up the A/C on your way out…

(Photo: When bad concerts happen to good cousins…)

This past Saturday was the best of times and the worst of times. Reconnecting with my favorite Chicagoan after a brief absence (and learning just how wrong an end of the stick I had gotten regarding his stress-induced sabbatical) was definitely the high point of the weekend.

So, too, was Sonny’s invitation to accompany him to the Robin Thicke/Jennifer Hudson double-bill concert at the Arie Crown Theater at McCormick Place. Considering I didn’t even eat my first Italian Beef until 2008, no one should be surprised that after six years in Chicago, Saturday was the first time I had ever set foot in the vast, labyrinthine complex that is McCormick.

Sonny wasn’t the only thing that drew me to the place. Though before the concert, I had no idea who Robin Thicke was (even with my newly clean-shaven, younger looking face, I am now officially that old), I was  curious to see what Jennifer Hudson could do live, in person, with no intervening editing. With high expectations, I was looking forward to finding out.

I’m still reeling from the great fun that was Robin Thicke’s opening set. For 75 minutes, his show was energetic, well-paced, kinetically illuminated, and effectively amped, and Thicke, himself, was totally engaged with the audience.

They were engaged right back with him, too–I’ve never seen more black women of all ages so ready to jump the bones of a young, skinny white boy. (As long as I’m on the subject, considering that his parents are the whitest folks in show business–Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring–where, exactly, does Robin Thicke’s accent come from?)

Perhaps the only off-notes in Thicke’s set were his repeated exhortations for the “men to be with their ladies” and “ladies to be with their men”. Considering that it’s 2009, I assume Thicke knows he has gay fans, especially in a city the size of Chicago. He shouldn’t shut them out in his act.

Still, even though I didn’t know a note of Robin Thicke’s music beforehand, I left at evening’s end with great appreciation for his youthful soul and smoky phrasing, and made a mental note to purchase some of his tracks from the iTunes Store.

In hindsight, we should we have left at intermission, instead.

Sonny called it before we even arrived at the Arie Crown, telling me, “Jennifer Hudson is going to suck.” I need to trust his judgment more frequently, because to the same degree that Robin Thicke’s act was a headliner-worthy production, to put it charitably, Jennifer Hudson’s was not.

That could be because Saturday’s concert was Hudson’s first hometown appearance since the murders that rocked her family in October 2008. I give her a lot of credit for embarking on her debut tour barely six months since the tragic events and I don’t blame her for wanting to publicly thank her family for their support and share her origins with her Chicago audience.

Had Hudson’s show (and showmanship, for that matter) been as electric as Thicke’s, the sour notes in the second-half of the evening would have been easier to swallow. Surprisingly, neither were.

For starters, Hudson’s producers saw fit to pump the amps throughout the Arie Crown to their highest levels from her opening note onwards, making her set physically painful to sit through (and we were two-thirds of the way up the balcony, at that). By the middle of the show, Sonny had his earplugs in and my ears where time-sharing my fingers so I wouldn’t go deaf in both of them simultaneously.

Events onstage were no less painful. On her next tour, Hudson would profit from a professional choreographer, lighting designer, and public speaking coach, none of whose services were anywhere evident when she took the stage Saturday night. Had it not been Jennifer Hudson’s over-amplified voice bludgeoning our ears into submission from (about a mile away) down there onstage, the entire production wouldn’t have had much to differentiate it from a high school senior showcase.

Most odd, though, was Hudson’s continual appeals–orders, really–for the crowd to welcome and cheer her family members. There were many opportunities to do so. At least a dozen times during her barely 60-minute performance, Hudson handed her microphone away to cousins in the first row, allowing them to  warble their way through one painful line, verse, or chorus after another.

The nadir came when Hudson invited a four-cousin singing troupe onstage to power through the Beatles’ “Let It Be”. They did a stunning job. Hudson could have left it there. Instead, she told them to sing another song, and then in her most bizarre move of the evening, walked offstage for five minutes.

In all, about 15 minutes of Saturday night’s Jennifer Hudson concert was sung by people other than Jennifer Hudson, leaving me wondering what fans who (unlike me) had paid to attend the show must have been thinking about the whole affair. (Perhaps that if they had wanted to hear Hudson’s cousins sing, they would have attended their South Side church and listened to them in the choir–for free?)

It isn’t as if the music made up for it. While Hudson sang four signature songs from Dreamgirls, she cut two of them short–including injudiciously cutting out the show-stopping note from the middle of “And I Am Telling You”, which was her only encore of the evening. Her other numbers were either covers of old R&B songs or forgettable original numbers like “Pocketbook” (sung while two drag-queen-esque women inexplicably stomped around the stage swinging their purses).

After the concert, Sonny and I compared notes as we shared a midnight Greektown dinner at Parthenon. I told him though I was disappointed by Hudson, I was totally turned on to Robin Thicke. He told me, “You look really good without your goatee.”

When I was done swooning, I swore to myself I’d attend another hometown Hudson concert before I’d grow it back, either.

(Photo: Xanadu: hysterical musical kitsch; or guidepost to the meaning of earthly existence?)

On Sunday, Mr. New Guy and I were in the audience at the Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place (there’s a name that could be shorter) for the final performance of the touring production of Xanadu. The musical was hysterical fun, but I was struck most by the line uttered by ancient-Greek-god Zeus to the former-muse Clio/now-mortal Kira that launches the show into the finale:

“To love another person and create art––that is Xanadu!”

Hearing that line, my inner Buddhist instantly perked up his Scooby-Doo ears. Buddhist dharma (and the teachings of every other religion I can think of) would suggest we all have an intrinsic nature of being beyond the mundane world we take for granted as reality. But as the price for coming to hang out on Earth for awhile, we forget our ineffable–or if you will, Divine–natures. We spend our lives never recognizing the true sum of what we are.

Heading down Michigan Avenue after the show, we stopped into a Starbucks where a bit of my nature was definitely recognized.

“Wait! I know you! Do you write a blog?” asked the barista, a young Asian woman, as soon as I walked up to the counter.

“Yes,” I offered, somewhat cautiously. After all, I was standing in a coffee bar and you may remember the controversy that erupted the last time I chatted with a barista. “I’m Chicago Carless.”

“Yeah!” the enthusiastic Starbucker replied. “I knew it! I’m Marian, I follow you on Twitter, and I’m on the Chicago Reporter Reader’s Bureau with you.” Had I attended my first Reader’s Bureau meeting, I probably would have recognized Marian right back.

She continued. “I just read the piece you wrote about the Mold-A-Ramas from the Brookfield Zoo. Hey! Wait a minute…”

Oh God. I knew what was coming.

“Is this Mister New Guy?!”

But by the way his eyes bugged out when she asked, he apparently didn’t.“She’s lucky you weren’t out with someone else,” he would tell me later.

Which leads me back to the ineffable nature of humankind.

If only our true identities were as familiar to us as headshots in the sidebar of a web page, we wouldn’t keep asking questions like: Where do we come from? Why are we are? And why do we do what we do?

God knows (I know I wish I did) why I feel driven to blog my way into the meaning of my life on an ongoing basis. For that matter, what drove those Xanadu performers into careers of nightly make-believe? What is the point of artistic expression, anyway? Simply, as the hackeneyed phrase would have it, to “imitate life”?

Buddhism offers one simple answer to most age-old questions like these: to wake up. If we truly are greater beings than we take ourselves to be, cut off from knowledge of our real natures while we live out our days in this world of SUVs, Suzie Orman, and ozone depletion, then maybe we’re driven to create art as a way to represent the memory of an esoteric origin we all share but cannot know for certain? Creating works of emotional or aesthetic resonance as a means of scratching a seminal spiritual itch, as it were.

And if that’s so, could it be that the point of life, itself, is simply to try and remember who we are? Could our task here on earth be nothing more or less than recapturing the sense of the Divine through the manner in which we live our lives? In which we love one another?

Some traditions would say we’re not motivated to fall in love solely by the personality of our loved one, but because of the sense of the Universe/God/the Divine (take your pick) that we feel when we look into our beloved’s eyes. In a sense, an idea that coming to love another is really coming to remember your connection to All That Is.

And if the reason we live and love is the same as the reason we create art, then how could anyone ever accuse art of imitating life? Because if you accept those terms, life is art.

As Oscar Wilde–and Ovid long before him–might argue, maybe, just maybe, the quality of the lives we lead really does matter. We can sleepwalk through life, or we can strive for the awareness to act, create, and love in ways that inspire one another and aspire to the Divine.

Clues to the meaning of life in a cheekily fabulous jukebox stage show? Just another question to add on to the list. But I do know at least one other person in whose eyes I am constantly reminded of all the playful, creative forces in God’s toolbox.

And that feels a lot like Xanadu to me.