Friday, June 15, 2012

What You Can Do In A Day

We had tickets to see a taping of Conan O'Brien's show at the Chicago Theater at 4.30 yesterday afternoon.

No, that's not exactly right: We had an email printout that would allow us to get tickets for the 4.30 taping.

No, no, no, I'm being imprecise. What we had was an email printout that would allow us to stand in a line that stretched from the Harold Washington Library, down the block, around the corner onto State Street, to pick up, starting at 9AM, ducats that would allow us to stand in line at the Chicago Theater until 3.30, when the doors opened, in the hopes of finding a seat on a first-come, first-served basis for a taping that would take place that afternoon.

Now, the Chicago Theater, with 3600 seats, is probably big enough to contain all the people in line yesterday morning. Probably, everyone in line yesterday morning got in line yesterday afternoon, and when the doors opened at 3.30, they probably all got in and got a seat. There were probably some empty seats left, way in the back.

But we're only here for a few days, and we didn't really want to devote an entire day to the Conan show. We took a Chicago Greeter tour instead, then went to a baseball game, then to the taping of a local radio show in Old Town ... a show that, coincidentally, had one of the same guests as that day's Conan show.

Conan O'Brien's giant head
link to the album of photos from Chicago

Thursday, June 14, 2012

On to the Second (Third) City


2012 Chicago



Shaking off the dust from the plains, I've headed into the fulcrum of the Midwest, Chicago.