Visit to the Jazz Age

Much has happened since last time I wrote. My sister has been visiting - her annual post-ice visit, but this time transplanted from sunny Sydney to the upper Midwest. We met up in Chicago for a weekend, then she was in Madison for a few days, and then back here for like a week and a half. She went back yesterday and I miss her desperately, but she got the ball rolling with the packing and refurnishing and now I can carry that momentum forward and start to get really settled in this town.

We stayed right inside the Loop in Chicago, mainly because we wanted to go to the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Art Institute. I found a hotel deal online that included tickets to the show, and as it turns out it was in one of the fanciest hotels in the city, the Hilton Palmer House. Dad said he remembers his mother listening to the radio to shows that were being broadcast from there, and Mom said her parents used to stay there when they went down to Chicago for conventions. So, the hotel and us have a long history that we didn't even know about. It's 100-and-some years old, right in the heart of town but just impossibly glamorous. Glamorous and cozy at the same time, which makes me long to hang out in the lobby again even now.

Sister and I did a bit of tourism and fine dining, and also caught up with a cousin who's in his first year at the Institute and is doing some really interesting work. One afternoon we walked up to the John Hancock building and had drinks at the top. It was very cold and windy, and required scarves wrapped around faces for walking around, even more so than Appleton.

The emblamatic experience of the trip for me was sitting in the hotel lobby, on lovely couches that were set off to the side a bit from the main thoroughfare. We could look up at the gilt ceiling and the heroic winged figures on the light fixtures and the glass and elaborate paint and doors to the upstairs ballrooms (plural). We could look across to the flower arrangements, which were these wacky spherical balls of yellow flowers sitting in what looked like an oversized martini glass, with a sweeping green frond of some kind of grass swooping around, looking like a wacky oversized fantastical Dr Seuss cartoon drink. We looked up as the waiter brought our artisanal local beers in tall, slim, cool glasses. We shuffled our feet to make room for all the shopping bags full of souvenirs and books and gifts from the Hopper show. We watched the people gather and head out for dinner - some glamorous young people in long black coats but many, many rich old ladies in fur, with solid be-suited rich husbands on their arms. We looked back up at the gilt ceiling and sighed and looked at each other and smiled and drank expensive, frosty beers and felt graciously welcomed and warm. What a place.