Ravinia with the girls

tammy made it happen: the conjunction of diversely dashing city bodies to converge on a metra train headed north for an evening of 1980’s heyday bands B-52’s and Go-Go’s.

and so we assembled, as women are wont to do laden with far too much food, for a picnic en plein aire surrounded by the reveling ravinia hordes and a steady dancebeat.

the evening was clear and fine with a touch of briskness that banished any evidence of insectlife.

general consensus was less than impressed with bored-looking B-52s :-( and enchanted by a swingy-haired, lilting belinda carlisle.

the tipsy train ride home was priceless.

backstage at the field museum

on thursday evening we went with chris’s mom and dad to the field museum’s member night and glimpsed behind the exhibitions to witness some of the designer’s spaces and rarer specimens. the things that most appeal to my eye are, I think, telling.

illustration sketches:

the exhibit design loft space:

and creatures:

Civic leadership change in Chicago

We have a new mayor!

I was proud to get out and exercise my democratic right to vote today in a world where this privilege is far from universal. I’m deeply conscious in the face of developing events in the Middle East and North Africa of my enormous good fortune and range of ideological motion and free speech in the first world, in the West, as a member of a long-standing democratic union whose respects for life and liberty far outweigh its developmental challenges on the grand scale of things.

I’m hopeful for Rahm Emanuel’s ability to helm the leadership and infrastructural changes we need so badly in Chicago.

It’s (beyond) high time to embrace progressive transparency in a city that has long and infamously bumped along on slipshod representational ethics.

Let’s hear it for our new Mayor, Rahm Emanuel!