Chicago day two: exploring and "As You Like It"

<--- Us before the play at the Shakespeare Center

Day two of our Chicago audition trip started off leisurely with a semi-late wake-up followed by another jaunt in the lovely heated pool. We spent a good while swimming (which I'm counting as my exercise for today) and then started off exploring the Skokie area. I'll have to say I'm quite a fan. It's a little bit out of the extreme crowded-ness that is mid and downtown Chicago, but there are still so many things to do! We spent most of the day hopping around from various bookstores to various outlets. Looking for a particular Gap Outlet (at which neither of us actually ended up buying anything) proved especially adventurous - I'm not sure exactly where it was, but it was definitely a bit seedier than our hotel area. With the exception of the Gap store, the majority of the little stores lining the streets reminded me almost of stores I'd seen in Belize or Nassau. Cheaply made boots, random knicknacks and souvenirs, and imported foods from Mexico and the Middle East lined the snow-streaked shop window panes - there were even several street vendors selling used CDs in foreign languages. Anyway, we ended up driving around the block the Gap store was on about four times trying to figure out how we were supposed to park. The parking meters looked different than ones we had seen before, and it took me a few blocks around to convince Andrew that the only way to tell how they worked would be to get out and look at them! When we finally did, of course it was supremely simple - it just looked weird because it accepted debit/credit cards. So now we know.

Tonight, as I mentioned in my last post, was the performance of "As You Like It" at the Chicago Shakespeare Center. We got started a little later than planned, so we didn't actually get to see too much of Navy Pier, but what we did see was so pretty! Everything was all lit up and it just all looked so very active. We drove past an impressive snow-carving exhibit that I'm sorry we didn't get to examine more closely, but at least we arrived in plenty of time for the performance.

Basically, the Chicago Shakespeare Center in and of itself is a selling point on the city for me. If everything goes well with Andrew's audition and this becomes an option, it will definitely have my vote. I loved everything about the performance - the actors were fantastic of course, but I equally enjoyed the thoughtfulness of the set design and music. The set was ingenuously simple - originally just an mansion-esque door to suggest the Duke's residence. However, the little touches and the way the actors used the entire theatre was so involving and well-planned that it simply worked. I have many many more thoughts on the play but due to the late hours I'm just going to leave myself a list of things to talk about at a later point:

- The clock as a symbol throughout the whole performance
- The convincing portrayal of Ganymede
- The tie in of "natural" elements throughout the stage design
- The blending of the nature/court life suggested
- Connections to the "green world" theory
- The ambivalence of sexuality in the play
- The awesome rope swing

I'll pick up discussion of the play hopefully tomorrow.To the left here is a fuzzy picture that I probably wasn't supposed to take of the set at intermission. The boards from the stage curve up into the suggestion of a tree.

Grad school auditions, round one

We took off directly after the MSU Orchestra concert last night for Chicago... grad school auditions, here we come! Well, technically, here Andrew comes - this is actually the only one I'll get to go on with him due to conferences and school-related matters. I hated missing a day of school after yet another slew of snow days, but what can you do?

Last night we stayed at a slightly seedy little Red Roof Inn in Urbana...we got there around 1:00 and were up and back on the road again by 6:30. The plan was for us to get into Chicago early just in case we got lost or Andrew wanted to practice some before his lesson. However, the mixture of a full day followed by a full night of driving followed by crappy sleep in a janky hotel made for one sleepy early-morning drive, and we ended up pulling over at a random truck stop and sleeping in the car for a while. After that, though, it was onward ho!

Andrew's lesson today went exceedingly well, which is awesome and bodes well for his audition on Sunday. The professor he worked with today told him he was a "great talent" and that she would lobby to get him a scholarship. It's great to hear hard work paying off...of course, nothing's set in stone yet, but I'm glad to hear him encouraged. Everyone should get the chance to do what they love to do, especially the people I love the most! Right now, he's still fiddlin' away with his practice mute on in the hotel room - since his official audition isn't until Sunday morning, we have a whole day out and about together in town tomorrow, which should be fun. Luckily, I opted for a nicer hotel since I knew we'd be staying longer than a few hours in this one. We've actually been pretty impressed with the Skokie Holiday Inn my trusty friend Hotwire.com suggested...it's really pretty and the room is very cute and comfortable. The bed in here feels like heaven compared to the plank we slept on last night. Plus, there's a huge pool and hot tub, and a little work-out center, so I got double exercise today to make up for the lack of it yesterday. Unfortunately, traveling means eating out - we did pretty well at lunch (Mediterranean cafe) but I couldn't dissuade Andrew from pizza tonight, which of course is our ultimate weakness. I was proud of him for venturing out and eating the Chicken Shawarma instead of just regular chicken tenders. :)

I've been attempting productivity during the spare bits of this trip, and since I'm done with lesson plans and over half done re-reading and re-annotating The Handmaid's Tale for class Monday night I think I'm set to take tomorrow off to just have fun. We may go swimming again in the morning, and then I know Andrew wants to go to a violin (so exciting), but after that our day is clear - we'll probably either just hit up some shopping or maybe go to the Field Museum. I'd kind of like to see the mummy exhibit again since I just finished Rick Riordan's first book in the Kane series, but Andrew didn't seem overtly thrilled by the idea so we may do something else...after all, he is already obliging me on my biggest request. Tomorrow night....wait for it...we're going to the Chicago Shakespeare Center!!! Yay!!! I know that everyone in the world shares my excitement on that one. Seriously, though. I'm embarrassingly excited about going to see As You Like It tomorrow - especially since they have this awesome deal where everyone under 35 gets the $75 tickets for $20. The Shakespeare center is HUGE and it's right on the Navy Pier - reportedly it's one of the best venues for Shakespeare.

Well, until later - I'm off to "Fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world." (As You Like It 1.1)

New Blog for the new year...

I need to begin by saying that I am a horrible blogger. I have attempted many blogs and kept up with...none of them. Not since the good ol' days of high school melodrama recorded under my screen name "jadedrose" (oh, oh, the dramatics) on Livejournal have I faithfully kept up with much of any kind of journal, online or paper.

However, this year has already been one of changes, so why not start now?

Primarily, I hoping this will keep me to my various goals. If I must say so myself, I've done a pretty fantastic job of keeping up with my teacher goals this year. I'm a super-fast grader and am pretty much always prepared...well, pretty much. I'm almost completely satisfied with how this year is going at HHS. Ask me again after the drama play is over. As of this week though, in addition to being a teacher, I'm also a student again, which leads to a whole new set of goals. My first graduate women's lit class was Monday and I LOVE IT I LOVE IT I LOVE IT. It was so extremely refreshing to have a non-forced (i.e., AP Lit) discussion about literature. If I could get my classes to discuss like we did in Dr. D's class just one time this year, I would be ecstatic. On here I'm going to try to keep up a reaction/reflection-type dialogue about that class. And I'll probably just complain about how hard linguistics is already.

My most important goals right now are for myself personally, and I have already come a long way but need to go further. At the end of the summer, I did a complete re-evaluation of how I was taking care of myself and decided it just wasn't cutting it. I am 23 years old and have no excuse for being unhealthy. So, this year I've started eating better and exercising a LOT more (hey, it's easy to exercise more when you weren't doing it at all!). Now I'm up to a pretty regular schedule of 25 minutes to an hour at least 4-5 days a week. Since August, I've lost 25 pounds...there was bit of a set-back round the holidays, but that damage has been repaired this month. Now I'm participating in this eight-week community weight-loss challenge, and my goal is to lose 8-10 more pounds. Hopefully that pans out! I just got to the point where I was completely unhappy with how I looked - I'm still a long way from where I want to be, but thankfully it's getting much better! If I can lose half of the weight I put on in college, I think I'll be good.

I'm working on a couple other goals as well, including:

• Reading more independently (good stuff, not so much fluff)
• Writing more - not just lesson plans and examples for class!
• Finding new recipes and actually cooking
  
• Being more faithful in my scripture reading
• Keeping up with housework!

So, this may be a little ambitious, but if I just keeping working a little bit at a time I know I can make some progress in all of these areas. In other news, I have wonderful husband, a great job, a nice place to live, good friends, and an overall happy life! This is still a time of change for us, but hopefully the changes just keep getting better!