Lunch at Charlie Trotter’s was just the start… a kind of cultural and gastronomic marathon with Chicago writ large… I’m talking about more than a tale of famous chefs with massive egos.
Everything in and about Chicago was grand–gigantic, imposing, soaring, extra wide, extra large, extra friendly, extra solid, extra un-Parisian.
We were like characters in “Midnight Cowboy,” starting up at all them tall buildings… I felt positively dwarfish, especially on public transportation, where the 6′ 5″ and 7′ set seemed particularly abundant. Not basketball players: linebackers! Guys with fingers the size and thickness of sausages. Women who looked like colossal sculptures, totems, Magna Mater incarnate.
Speaking of sculptures, the public art was giant, sprawling, huge, overwhelming…
Did you say the Windy City? Lifting skirts and spirits?
Dinosaurs and mammoths seemed appropriate symbols, part of an artwork on one of the widest, longest, busiest viaducts I’ve ever crossed…
The servings of food in Chicago were giant sized, enough for two or three normal humans of the kind we consort with in Paris.
Alison had the chicken special: an entire chicken? We got a doggie bag–a Great Dane bag. The chuck lasted 3 days.
A little pizza, did you say?
I’m not ribbing you: this was obscene, but delicious… I fed off the poor porker for 2 days…
Our friend Frank had a little sandwich… a mere snack…
No one was singing it but the tune was in the air… the words broadcast visually from a tall neon sign:
Chicago! Chicago!!
Even the weather was heavier than normal: giant rain drops, violent, powerful winds, a killer heatwave followed by freezing cold–the thermometers must be extra tough to survive Chicago’s climate.
Helpfulness and consideration also grow to outsized proportions in this sprawling, vast megalopolis. The inhabitants take small, lost outsiders by the elbow–metaphorically, since touching doesn’t seem to be big–and lead them to labyrinthine museums, restaurants the size of sports stadiums, or the unlikely entrances to the roaring “L” train system.
You call this a lobby? A dirigible could park in Renzo Piano’s new wing at the Chicago Art Institute
Though Chicagoans appear by and large to be quiet, reserved people their city is anything but quiet. The “L” trains rattle and roar and swoosh around town day and night. We stayed in a wonderful place that was about 100 feet from the overhead. The term “juggernaut” took on new meaning for me.
The guy across from me on the platform was over 7 feet tall! I used a bullhorn to converse with him…
After the well-ordered, symmetrical, compact gorgeousness of Paris the bigness, brashness and blaring sound of rough-and-ready Chicago was the source of endless fascination: railway yards, pot-holed streets, highways and freeways carving up town, forests of skyscrapers, endless grid-block streets as wide as the widest turnpikes in France… horns blasting on every cab (were we in NY?), SUVs by the thousand, limos longer than French train cars.
We’re going to rent a DVD of “Metropolis” and relive Chicago as we continue our book tour and photo events in California (and, later, in New York). As I write this a giant redwood tree is staring back at me. So perhaps the theme of our trip is gigantism…
More on Chicago and Paris soon…
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