SOFA
Every year at this time, there's the big Sculptural Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) show at Navy Pier. And every year, I don't go, because it's also the first weekend of the Humanities Festival and I can never squeeze out enough time to make it worth the price of a ticket, and the Thursday night preview is more than I want to pay. This year, however, I entered a contest at Time Out magazine, and won a VIP pass - admission to the VIP Opening Night and all weekend, and a free catalogue. Food & drink & art! What could be bad? There were some astonishingly beautiful pieces. I fell in love with a lot of stuff, including a hanging scroll by Lucy Arai, a glass and textile piece by Einav Mekori, this necklace by Pawel Kaczynski, and kimono by Tanya Lyons of glass and twigs and metal mesh. None of which I can really afford. I decided it would be nice to have a) a bottomless bank account with which to buy art, and, b) infinite space in which to display it!
The night before, I went to dinner and the Goodman with friends. There are usually four of us, but Peggy didn't come. The rest of us were at the restaurant waiting for her, and Margaret said it was odd that Peggy hadn't called her or returned her calls. I decided to call her cell, got her voice mail and left a message. A couple of minutes later she called back. "I'm in Washington!", she said. "I thought the play was next week!" She travels a lot on business and we generally check her schedule and change our tickets, but somehow it had slipped past her that she had the conflict.
In the event, she didn't miss much. The play was "High Holidays", by Alan Gross. Set in 1963 in a Chicago suburb, it revolves around a boy preparing for his bar mitzvah (which is set for the "third Shabbos in November", cue foreshadowing music), his emotionally (and, at times, physically) abusive parents, and his hippy college drop-out older brother. The plot didn't hang together, the characters weren't particularly likeable, and there were some serious inconsistencies. Although the actors playing the parents were good, the actor playing the 13-year-old protagonist was not. I also think that if a playwright needs to have the main character come out at the end to address the audience and explain what happened next, it shows that he just didn't know how to write the ending. And nitpicky me whose parents dragged her and her sibs to Pete Seeger concerts from when we were old enough to walk will not believe that these middle-class Jewish parents didn't know who he was.
But dinner was good.
The night before, I went to dinner and the Goodman with friends. There are usually four of us, but Peggy didn't come. The rest of us were at the restaurant waiting for her, and Margaret said it was odd that Peggy hadn't called her or returned her calls. I decided to call her cell, got her voice mail and left a message. A couple of minutes later she called back. "I'm in Washington!", she said. "I thought the play was next week!" She travels a lot on business and we generally check her schedule and change our tickets, but somehow it had slipped past her that she had the conflict.
In the event, she didn't miss much. The play was "High Holidays", by Alan Gross. Set in 1963 in a Chicago suburb, it revolves around a boy preparing for his bar mitzvah (which is set for the "third Shabbos in November", cue foreshadowing music), his emotionally (and, at times, physically) abusive parents, and his hippy college drop-out older brother. The plot didn't hang together, the characters weren't particularly likeable, and there were some serious inconsistencies. Although the actors playing the parents were good, the actor playing the 13-year-old protagonist was not. I also think that if a playwright needs to have the main character come out at the end to address the audience and explain what happened next, it shows that he just didn't know how to write the ending. And nitpicky me whose parents dragged her and her sibs to Pete Seeger concerts from when we were old enough to walk will not believe that these middle-class Jewish parents didn't know who he was.
But dinner was good.