Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

I think I woke up a little the worse for the beer on Saturday morning, but Mark & I got coffee, then we woke up the kids and went for a real breakfast. Our favorite Greek-owned breakfast place moved a few blocks west, on Madison St. on the border between River Forest & Forest Park, where I used to live, and, when we went in 2007, we didn’t like it quite as well. Meanwhile, the diner that was always in downtown Oak Park, that was extremely mediocre the few times I tried it when I lived in the vicinity 15 years ago, seems to have improved to become the breakfast spot of choice. So that’s where we went.  I had over medium eggs that were really over medium; adequate sausage – not as good as Willow Creek or Usinger, or even Johnsonville but cheaper than the first two brands anyways; OK potatoes – well-cooked but could’ve been browner; and toast that could’ve been a lot hotter, but at least the butter was soft enough to spread on it, cold as it was.

Down to Lolla-land in time for Blues Traveler who were pleasant enough. Then we bailed – listened to Against Me!’s first song on the way out – and went to the Art Institute, to see Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was a pretty amazing show – especially to us baby boomers raised on Life magazine, and photo journalism. The images were presented on their own, for the most part – there were two photo essays, on Mao’s China and a business in NYC, both in the 1960s (shades of Mad Men), that included Cartier Bresson’s captioning, but the rest were mostly just places and dates.The Chicago Tribune did a nice article on Sunday morning with a two-page spread (not recreated in the online copy) of some of the most striking and familiar images, like Brie:

Then back to Lollapalooza – we went to the more southern food court – Balbo St. – because the reviews were saying there were more interesting choices there, but we got pulled pork sandwiches, an easy & familiar choice. Then we sat in a kind of trampled and cigarette butt-littered, but shady, area, heard 4 AFI songs, and ate. Then it was time to reclaim our hillside spots to see Social Distortion, and the big closer of night, Green Day. Slightly Stoopid played in between. I listened for a little bit of them, and I hadn’t realized how reggae they are. John says the stoners love them. I didn’t love them all that much so I went to get an ice cream. I admired the technique the place selling the ice cream was using – 5 flavors, all waffle cones, frozen in the cone, with a sheet of plastic on top, that they peeled off as they handed it to you. Everything $5. No scooping, spoons, change, etc. I had cookie dough, and the ice cream itself, sadly, was not as good as the technique.

Here’s how old punk rock is – Mike Ness is almost 50, and Billie Joe Armstrong is almost 40. Not only that, founding punkers like Joey Ramone and Malcolm McLaren and Joe Strummer have died from old age diseases like cancer and heart attacks, not drug overdoses. And one of the founders of Lookout Records is over 60, and friends with my brother – their blogs link to each other.

So I’ve seen Green Day about 4 times now. And I think their showmanship has only gotten better and better. They engage the crowd – they bring people up on stage, they get the crowd singing along, they throw out t-shirts and usually gve away a guitar. At Lollapalooza, they had the first guy they brought up dive off – and Billie Joe told everyone in the front rows to put down their cell phones, so they could catch him. They brought up a really little girl, and a guy who not only knew all the words to Longview, and had a decent voice, he ran back and forth across the stage a la Mr. Armstrong. I get a little irked by all the antics, though, and start to think, “wait, I don’t want to hear the crowd sing, I want to hear the band” – but they are so charming about it all, you just gotta love ’em. This show they worked in a bunch of covers, too: Hey Jude, and Sinatra’s My Kind of Town (Chicago Is) – and Tre Cool wore a Lady Gaga bra and straw hat, too. And they played a solid 2 1/2 hours with fireworks, pyrotechnics, and a mix of old and new.

Subtitle: “or, why I’ve had no time to write”.

The good: the week-long orientation session for incoming distance students, beginning their degree in library & information studies. I was the chief organizer, but this event was pulled off with a cast of thousands, er, uh, dozens at least, including the 29 students themselves. This was the first iteration of what will become an annual event, and some things worked better than others. We kept telling the students that they were our eldest children, a.k.a. experiments. Still, as I said on the last morning, even though things were not perfect, the good far outweighed the bad, overall, for the week. In the past, the distance students came for one day, then we met for class on TV for two semesters. Spending a whole week together was a far better way for us all to bond – they got to be with the entire class, rather than divided into 3 groups at the sites where the video conference was delivered, and I got to see their faces in living color, instead of blurry ovals on the screen.

And then as a kind of nice little coda to the symphony, as I was biking home after the last morning’s events, I met up with one of the students. She – understandably – hadn’t wanted to pay for parking on campus, so she left her car at a relative’s (I think it was a brother & sister in-law) and they gave her a bike and helmet. She was trying to figure out how to bike to their place to collect her car, and Google maps gave her a combo of bike path and city streets. I was able to give her better bike-path-following directions, and we biked partway together, and hugged on parting. She’s 2nd from the right in the upper picture, turned to the right and laughing in the second, and now I am sure, safely back in Minneapolis.

New students, fall 2010

Bootcamp set up polaroid - but the iPhone Polaroids are slower than regular digital pictures, so the set up function is thwarted.

The bad: the extremely disagreeable 14-year-old foster daughter, who’s been living with me since March. We are at the point now where I can’t say anything to this kid without getting an argument. Not fun at all.

Construction Detours

The ugly: the construction around my building and all over campus. This is the banner from the UW Physical Plant office construction page, but the project outside my building must be at least in part city of Madison streets, because it’s not even listed. I think the tipoff is that under the Park & Langdon intersection job, the city says UW will be installing underground utilities – and we in fact had no water in my building almost all day Wednesday of orientation …. I’ll add some more pictures, soon. I missed the money shot, Friday – a group of the new distance students, leaving after the close of the orientation, making their way on the narrow pedestrian path between the major excavations, fences, and dinosaur-size big diggers.

posted from my iPhone – at least partly.

Panzanella – the bread soaks up the tomato’s juices and tastes like distilled summer. And we had possibly the best trifle ever, with cherries, apricots and yellow and ginger cakes, for dessert. Recipe following. Trifle recipe.

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Or nectarine, anyways. Last night I had a Willy Street Board meeting. They gave us dinner, but I tried to eat pretty light, plus I biked a lot, so I felt justified in eating ice cream at 10:00 p.m.

Sometimes in the summer, the UW creamery, Babcock Hall, makes peach Melba ice cream – peach ice cream with a raspberry swirl. I’ve been looking for it hopefully at the ice cream counter at the student union, but it has not materialized.

Last night I was all ready to eat the last of the 5-quart bucket of vanilla with chocolate sauce. Then I remembered that I had a couple of nice ripe nectarines, and some raspberry sauce (filling actually, from the raspberry bars at the last summer supper). So, I topped my dish of ice cream with those. It was almost as good as the Babcock Hall peach Melba – a few little ice chips here & there – it was the bottom of the bucket of ice cream, after all. And missing the peach-y creaminess of peach ice cream as a base, because I only had vanilla.

posted from my iPhone

On the last night of the conference, Tuesday, they put on a big event for us at Navy Pier with a blues band, cash bar – but we got two drink tickets at registration – and lots of food. Plus silly games like bumper car bikes, and balloon animals.

And, this time I got back to the room in time to see the last 15 mins. of Public Enemies – that I saw in a theater in Chicago just about a year ago, when it first came out. Just enough time for me to watch Johnny Depp as Dillinger watch a Clark Gable as a gangster, and get shot in the street after. I thought they filmed it at the Chicago Theater on Lake Street, but they used the Biograph up on Lincoln Avenue, which is where the real Dillinger got shot – and evidently a nice upgrade to the Biograph’s facade. Come to think of it, I might’ve seen a play there – Chicago’s Victory Garden Theater company bought it in 2004.

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