After our visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday, July 30, Anne Mei and I took a cab over to Steppenwolf Theatre on Halsted for a matinee performance of “Between Riverside and Crazy,” another journey “across the street.” Pops, the central character in this play is a former NYC policeman, who was shot six times by a rookie white cop in an after-hours bar. When the play opens, Pops still grieves for his wife who died of cancer less than a year before. He sits in her wheelchair. It’s summer, but the Christmas tree that was up at the time of her death is still there and lit.
I don’t want to say more for fear of spoilers. Suffice it to say, we were both drawn into the vortex of love and greed swirling around Pops. The play has complexity that merits seeing this production again, and seeing other productions for how other artists interpret the characters and their stories. I might go to see “War Paint” again for the music, but the complexity of its characters and stories is more operatic than dramatic.
This morning (July 31) Anne Mei and I went back to Pipers Alley for a Second City walking tour of its Old City neighborhood. We learned a lot of Chicago history, and heard colorful stories about Second City alumni. In the afternoon we visited the famous Lincoln Park Zoo, if not the best certainly one of the top two zoos I’ve ever seen.
We fly back to Trenton early tomorrow morning (August 1) to find out how much damage the heavy rains have done in the Princeton area. We do know that our dog sitter took good care of Toto through it all.