best story of the semester
So finals are over and I'm back home, meaning I finally have time to tell my best story from this semester. File this under the category, "It's a good thing Mom didn't know exactly what was going on until I was back safe!"My CSem class, which you've been hearing bits about all semester, decided to take my professor's offer to pay for our tickets for a play if we would pay for transportation. The play was "Nathan the Wise," which we had read this semester, and it was running in Chicago.
So we made plans to go on Thursday of study days, made dinner reservations before the play, and met on Thursday at library circle -- in the midst of a swirling snowstorm. But we already had the tickets, right? We were going no matter what. That would be reason #1 for the above categorization of this story, followed closely by #2: I ended up in the car with the 19-year-old Texan driver who fishtailed a little on his very first left turn. The drive into Chicago ended up being not that bad actually...messy and hard to see at times, but not too terribly slow. We told Grant (the driver) not to worry about silly details like lanes, just follow the tracks you can see. Once we got onto the Skyway (the big Chicago freeway), I checked my watch and the mapquest directions, and realized we had about 10 miles to go and about 10 minutes until our dinner reservation. I thought, hey, we could actually still make this.
And then we entered Chicago traffic.
Just so you know, this was the first big (6"-8") snowfall to hit Chicago this year. Our reservations were for 5:45, at a place pretty much downtown as far as I know -- north of Navy Pier and Michigan Ave. anyway. So we're stuck in stop-and-go traffic on Lake Shore Drive. Half an hour passes...an hour...an hour and a half....two hours later, we still haven't gone the full 10 miles. On the plus side, we did get to drive past Lake Michigan, which was really creepy looking because somehow the snow was floating on top of the lake, and the effect was like a rolling snow field. creeeeepy. but cool.
Anyway, the various cars had been keeping in touch with each other via cell phone, and the two other cars decided to try some back routes (my TA was one of the drivers, and his fiance lives in Chicago, so he sort of knew what he was doing). I tried calling Chris and had him look up where we were, since of course we didn't have any maps, and there was much rejoicing when he said we were just a block or two away. (And by rejoicing, I mean hysterical screaming/giggling. But in a manly way by the guys, of course.) Just to emphasize again how slow this was, it took us about 10-15 minutes to drive past Soldier Field. One football stadium. 15 minutes. Sheesh.
We finally got to the theater about 5 minutes before the play started, dinnerless of course, and pretty much parked in a snow bank. At this point, five hours into the trip, the other passenger and I were just like, "park the car and freakin let us out, nobody will check the meter anyway." We were the first group to get there, and the first theater-type poster we saw advertised "naked men singing." We were really hoping that wasn't what we had just driven 5 hours to see, but luckily our theater was two doors down. We got in, bought some candy bars in the lobby, got into the theater itself, and then realized that our group of 12 would compose about 2/3 of the audience that night.
Then the play itself started....and we realized it was really, really bad. It wasn't direct from the original play but a modern "interpretation," and as someone from our group pointed out, not only had they added random relationships and a much more tolerant theme (woot Islam!), it sounded like George Lucas had written most of the dialogue. ("I don't love your beauty...I love what's deeper in you." "Although you are a raisin [as compared to a green or ripe grape], I still want to eat you.") Imagine the consequences yourself: a bunch of college students, having spent the past 5 hours driving through a snowstorm and eating candy bars for dinner, watching a classic play get butchered. I was biting my tongue to keep from laughing out loud, and my surrounding classmates weren't exactly helping!
(In all fairness, the play wasn't all that bad. If you hadn't read the original you probably would've thought it was decent.)
After the play we all wandered the surrounding blocks, breaking our own paths in the snow where the sidewalks were supposed to be, looking for a place to eat. We tried one place, but ended up crashing an office party's karaoke night. Finally we decided to eat after getting on the road for awhile.
After we pushed ourselves out of the now-giant snowbank (and by "we" i mean "Mike"), we headed for home. We ended up getting too far apart to make any attempt to eat together worthwhile, so we stopped at MickeyD's, where I discovered that 3 am is the magic moment when McDonald's switches over to its breakfast menu. (The play had ended around 11:30 ND time, we left Chicago probably around 12:30 ND time, and it was about 2:45 when we stopped, half an hour away from campus.) On the way back we saw someone trying to push another car out of a snowbank by using their own car, and managed to get hit by a pile of snow coming from a snowplow clearing off the overpass above us.
I managed to get back to my room a little before four am, which was shortly after the TA called to make sure we got back to campus ok (how many people get phone calls from their TA at 4 am?).
But at least now I have stories to reminisce about at college reunions forever. Good times, y'all, good times.
posted by Jessica @ 1:10 AM
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