All About Trey

Chicago! (Part 3)

Our final day in Chicago was filled with food, shopping, and music!

We met up with Mr. No Karma’s friend for a little Sunday brunch. Of course we completely forgot that it was Father’s Day. Have you tried to just walk in to a restaurant on Father’s Day without reservations? Yeah, not pretty. But we did manage to find some place and then loitered at the bar with our Bloody Maries before we finally got a table. Brunch was good, but just way too much food. Afterwards, we walked up and down Halsted St doing some shopping. We did go into a couple of stores in Boystown, including one where I got a great muscle t-shirt that says “Saint” on it. ; )

Then we wandered south down Halsted and passed through these great little neighborhoods. It’s just so unlike DC or any other place I’ve been. They little neighborhoods actually have their own little quaint, discreet, shopping strips that are really nice. I mean, how many neighborhoods do you know that have their own Barney’s Co-op?

One of the weird things we saw as we walked was a huge billboard on the side of a building apparently slamming the pervasiveness of iPods. The billboard had a series of like comic book squares that included a picture of a crazy robot with the title, “iRobot.” Or the picture of a puppetter with little marinettes that all had iPods on that was titled “iPuppets.” Then of course a flock of sheep wearing iPods titled “iSheep.” It was kind of weird and disturbing, but cool.

After our little walking tour of parts of Chicago, we headed back down to the hotel to recuperate and rest before the main event. The Madonna concert. After getting showered and dressed in our newly purchased trashion, No Karma and I took at cab to the United Center. We got there about an hour before the show was supposed to start, well atleast according to the time on the ticket. We had already been forwarned that the show would start late, and that her highness doesn’t like air conditioning, so be prepared to sweat. Anyways, we got down to the Center and we began our people watching. It was definitely very interesting. While of course there were some gay guys around, there really weren’t that many. I figured most of the A-list gays probably went on the first two nights. Instead we were seeing a very broad mix of people who almost uniformly had bad hair. No really. Really, really bad hair. It was like they imported them from New Jersey. Of course we played the count the cammo shorts game, but tired of that quickly. Then it was time for the main event.

I will say unequivocally that the show was amazing. She’s 47 and just looks so good. Unreal almost. We had great seats. We were kind of at the 50 yard point in the arena, and dead even with the outer most stage. And then only 50 feet or so from one of the side stages. Definitely worth the extremely large price tags. The music, the imagery, the dancing, the special effects, they were all awesome. And it was totally high energy. For one of the numbers, they lowered this set of bars and platforms that looked like an adult jungle gym and then the dancers just sort of jumped, hurdled, climbed, swung, and just glided over and through it to the very fast beat of the music. I was exhausted just by watching it. She also had some strange imagery that shows horses falling. Kind of a flashback to the fall she took off a horse. But it was almost painful to watch as these horses fell and you know they were seriously injured. One of the best imagery was a counter that increased so quickly it was hard to keep up until it was in the tens and hundreds of thousands. The number kept building through the song and ended at 12,000,000. And then a picture of an emaciated small African child. There are 12 million children in African who are orphaned due to AIDS. Just a very powerful imagery with a very powerful song to it. Yes we saw the mirrored cross. But really, it wasn’t that shocking. She performed for almost exactly two hours. I would have liked to have heard more of her older stuff, but that’s what Madonnaramas are for. Anyways, it was just an awesome concert.

I didn’t return to DC. I had to catch a flight to San Diego, so I left Mr. No Karma at the airport. I had landed in San Diego, gotten the rental car, gotten to the hotel, done some work, gone out to dinner, and come back to do more work before Mr. No Karma even got home. His story is just so wrong, in a funny way of course.

posted by Trey @ 12:08 AM