Stargazing

I went to see "Stars of the Lyric Opera" at Millennium Park Friday night. Once a year, the Lyric parades out a few of their featured singers of the season with their orchestra in this free-to-the-public concert downtown. It used to be at the Grant Park venue, but since the opening of Millennium Park in '02 they have performed at the far superior Pritzker Pavillion. These concerts are always super-crowded, but I attend virtually every year. I've had season tickets to the Lyric for several seasons now, but there was a time in the not-too-recent past (Remember Bennigan's? I try not to.) when all I could afford was a free concert in a park. A big part of what brought me to Chicago was what it offered to me in the realm of the arts, and watching and listening to singers like Renee Fleming and Ben Heppner in the fresh air, grass under my toes, surrounded by a few thousand fellow Chicagoans, helped tide me over to the time when I could afford a ticket to the real deal.

I was sitting, this past Friday, on the Great Lawn of the Pritzker, under a massive metal lattice that holds the sound system, listening to excerpts from "The Barber of Seville" (one of my favorites!) and "Tosca" (which I'll get to see in November). A couple of my friends had joined me. The lawn was not too damp, and the chill in the air present but not overwhelming. At one point, as a duet from "La Boheme" rose from the stage & filled the air with the achingly sweet sounds of Mimi & Rodolfo's doomed love, I looked up at the sky, and a thought occurred to me.

I'm just about done with this place.

Because, at that moment, it wasn't the Chicago skyline I wanted to see. I've spent countless moments looking up from downtown and seeing the magnificence of the Aon Center, the Hancock Building, that curvy Streeterville high-rise whose proper name I can't ever remember (but I do know that there, a 450 square foot condo costs 1.5 million dollars), and now Trump Tower cutting its own way through that swath of steel and glass. At that moment, with Puccini's brilliance swimming through my ears, I wanted to look up and gaze at the stars, to take in the glory of the heavens, not the swaggering of man's puny creations. And do you know how many stars I could see from my spot on the Great Lawn of the Pritzker Pavillion in downtown Chicago at 9 o'clock at night?

Three. Just three. The city lights, well, they just drown them out.

I'm about ready. I've been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, got the autograph. I am just about ready to take this, all of this, the memories of concerts and ball games and cab rides and broken hearts, of museums, parks, street fairs, Lake Shore Drive, of dreams that died, dreams that rest, dreams that awoke in me new as babes, of boats and green river water and the bridges, the bridges that rose, that fell, that burned oh so bright as I lit them behind me, and carry it all with me somewhere else.

Some place where I can look up at the night sky and, without straining, take in the stars.

-C.