Litany of Complaints

• Our Disney vacation is over
• I didn’t win the marathon
• Perhaps because there was only a half marathon
• Perhaps not
• But now we’ll never know
• Will we?
• No, we won’t
• Anyway ...
• Disney water
• It tastes like History and Safety First
• Turning it into ice and putting it in Diet Coke doesn’t help
• And it CERTAINLY doesn’t help the Diet Coke
• Speaking of ...
• A large cup of Disney History And Safety First ice with a splash of a Diet Coke costs less than $6
• But not much less
• Disney has stopped using lids on its fountain sodas
• Which is awesome from an environmental standpoint
• And I assume from a cost-overhead standpoint
• Plus an ordering-supplies-and-dealing with-invoices-and-delivering-stuff-to-all-the-restaurants standpoint
• But definitely not from a don’t-spill-your-tiny-splash-of-Diet-Coke-on-yourself-when-you-get-jostled-in-the-crowds standpoint
• Safety First!
• Anyway ...
• Runner dudes with muscularly lean, distractingly shapely calves
• Who didn’t ask me on dates
• Probably because they didn’t want to make things weird in front of their wives and kids
• BECAUSE ALL OF THE RUNNER DUDES WITH MUSCULARLY LEAN, DISTRACTINGLY SHAPELY CALVES HAD WIVES AND KIDS
• I am developing a healthy animosity toward wives and kids
• People who wore their race medals to the parks
• Three days after their races
• Really?
• Was a full day of wearing a rigid, itchy ribbon around your neck with a heavy, clangy medal bouncing against your chest a productive enhancement to your sweaty Disney joy?
• Asking for a friend
• Also:
• Also!
• People who stopped in the middle of a crowd of moving people to do something vitally important like take a selfie or scratch an elbow or clap on 1 and 3 or whatever other pressing needs really stupid, rude people face in their center-of-the-universe days
• Grrrrrr
• I bought three race shirts and zero other souvenirs but I somehow couldn’t get my suitcase closed this morning
• My cargo shorts are out to get me
• Or perhaps they wanted to stay a few more days
• And I broke their eminently-practical-and-yet-appropriate-as-always-multiple-pocketed hearts
• Now I’M the bad guy
• Speaking of my eminently-practical-and-yet-appropriate-as-always-multiple-pocketed cargo shorts ...
• I finally stopped having little panic attacks every time I realized I couldn’t feel my car keys in my front right pocket
• When I get home tonight, I’m going to start having an unsightly key bulge in my front right pocket again
• And it might be uncomfortable since I’m not used to it anymore
• WHEN
• WILL
• MY
• SUFFERING
• END
• ?
• We got our bills from our Magic Bands that we wore all week to buy food and charge it to our room ...
• Ouch
• Not OUCH
• But still ouch
• (I’m talking about the final tally of charges and not the bands themselves; the bands were actually quite comfortable)
• Remember our fancy, four-princess dinner in Cinderella’s castle where we got to see the fireworks show outside the quatrefoil-gothic castle windows?
• We were told our dinner was vaguely “already taken care of” at the end
• We assumed that meant it had been automatically charged to our Magic Bands, so we blithely went on our merry way
• But ...
• There was no fancy-four-princess-dinner-in-Cinderella’s-quatrefoil-gothic-window-castle charge on our bills this morning
• Was it an oversight?
• A surprise Summer Of Running Away From Being 50 birthday gift?
• A random act of Disney benevolence?
• Pre-emptive compensation for not winning the marathon?
• Do we need to contact them to see which option it was?
• THIS SITUATION IS NOT COVERED IN THE DISNEY PROTOCOL HANDBOOK
• Not a complaint: Our entire Disney stay was a beautifully immersive experience of colors and ethnicities and accents and physical abilities and sexualities and gender fluidities and ages and family sizes
• Especially on It’s a Small World
• ESPECIALLY on It’s a Small World
• That ride gives me hives
• On my runner-chafed unmentionable locations
• Anyway ...
• We never encountered an instance of racism or xenophobia or hostility or even poorly hidden frustration over our differences
• During the entire week of our stay
• In fact, we all seemed to celebrate each other and gladly accommodate people in wheelchairs and families with excited kids so we could all enjoy our collective Disney experience together
• For a whole week
• Except, of course, for the people who stopped in the middle of a crowd of moving people to do something vitally important like take a selfie or scratch an elbow or clap on 1 and 3 or whatever other pressing needs really stupid, rude people face in their center-of-the-universe days
• MAJOR. PET. PEEVE.
• Anyway ...
• We’re re-entering the ugly, not-Disney-égalité-fraternité world of our shithole president and his shithole orbit today
• I don’t know how all of you survived it over the last week
• But re-enter we must
• In a cloud of voter optimism and hope
• And three new race shirts that make my suitcase uncloseable
• My flight home is at 5:14 tonight
• Erik’s is at 2:31
• So we took the early Disney bus to the airport for him to catch his flight and for me to chill with a couple of books and a fully charged phone for a while
• I’m currently typing this as I sit in a comfy chair in front of the airport Chick-fil-A
• Speaking of non-Disney-égalité-fraternité
• My browser app keeps crashing on me, so I’m obsessively select-all-ing and copying this post after every other bullet I write
• Just so I don’t lose this freaking endless list of rambling, mostly pointless litany-of-complaints line items
• Freezing and crashing apps are many-times-a-day occurrences on my iPhone X
• I am SOOOOOOO not impressed with the iPhone X
• Save your money and get an abacus and two cans with a string
• Much more reliable
• And affordable
• Anyway ...
• I had an awesome vacation with an awesome friend and an awesome surprise finish of a half marathon I’d fully expected to choke on and possibly even have to quit
• And now I’m chilling in a bustling airport seated near two hip and cool teenagers who are using hip-and-cool-teenager patois like “brah” to talk to each other and “my boy” to talk about their (presumably male) friends
• It’s both charming and amusing
• And I’m in a happy place, both in my head and in this airport
• Except the airport’s escalators look like they were installed in a columbarium
• Brah

1. Last training run of the season!

2. My second and last half marathon is in eight days.
3. And no, I won’t be training any more for it.
4. Because after my summer of chronic injuries and my aborted NewBo half marathon, I’ve kind of given up.
5. But I’ll start next weekend’s half marathon with optimism and see what happens.
6. I’ll also start with a super-cute outfit.
7. So there’s that.
8. Rob and Scott joined me this morning for our last hurrah of 2018.
9. They’ve been awesome running buddies and all-around friends all summer.
10. Now that training season is over, I’m sure we’ll revert to our usual state of evil, backstabbing nemesises.
11. Those poopyheads.
12. See? It’s already started.
13. It’s impossible to say nemesises without sounding gay.
14. Same with cilantro citrus salad.
15. Sssssssssssssss.
16. David also ran with us.
17. But he’s either an overachiever or a showoff because he kept running when we stopped so he could do more miles.
18. So he didn’t get to be in the selfie.
19. The poopyhead.
20. Nemesises.
21. I’m sweaty.
22. And sleepy.
23. And sworn to secrecy about my cilantro citrus salad recipe.
24. So shhhhhhhhhh!
25. I saw a show long ago that took place on a gay ship named the SS Sibilant S.
26. I don’t remember where I saw it, but it was silly.
27. Anyway.
28. We chose a pretty tree as the background for our final selfie today.
29. Which is so low-concept that it forced me to wander off on a whistley-lisp tangent here.
30. Whistley lisp.
31. Cilantro Nemesis and the Whistley Lisps.
32. I’ll take Polka-Punk Bands I Would Never Listen To for ssssssix hundred, Alex.
33. Sssssssso sssssssleepy.
34. My knee injury is apparently NOT as healed as it had led me to believe.
35. I don’t see it causing me any problems for the Disney races, but it will certainly make its presence known.
36. I may have a goofknee, but at least I don’t have a plutoe.
37. I just made that up.
38. You owe me sssseven dollars if you found it amusing.
39. Good jokes don’t write themselves.
40. And a GOOD joke would cost you a whole lot more.
41. Mom made a peach pie while we were out running.
42. I bought my folks some fancy pie fillings when I was in Galena.
43. And my dad’s birthday is Tuesday.
44. Which is more than enough reason to spontaneously bake a pie.
45. So is the fact that the jars of pie filling were still sitting on the counter where they couldn’t be ignored.
46. Since he’s blind, we’re getting him an Alexa (or one of her smart-speaker sisteren, I forget which) in the hopes that she’ll make it easier for him to listen to the news or play music or bake a pie or whatever else it is that those things do.
47. Since he’s blind, he also can’t read Facebook so I can say what his gift is here and he’ll never know.
48. AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BLAB TO HIM.
49. Because Alexa will find out and hunt you down and make you listen to Polka Punk.
50. Smart speaker sisteren.
51. You thought I was gonna let that one slide, didn’t you?
52. Ssssslide.
53. To review:
54. Nemesises.
55. Cilantro citrus salad.
56. Sweaty.
57. Sleepy.
58. Sworn to secrecy.
59. Cilantro citrus salad recipe.
60. SS Sibilant S.
61. Silly.
62. Whistley lisp.
63. Cilantro Nemesis and the Whistley Lisps.
64. Smart-speaker sisteren.
65. Ssssslide.
66. Sixty-six.
67. Well THAT was a surprising coincidence.
68. Surprising coincidence.
69. Sssssssso sssssssleepy.
70. See ya!

1. I finally ran the Nordic Fest Elveløpet 15K

2. But not really.

3. There were probably 100 15K runners overall.
4. I was clearly dead last of the runners by mile 4.
5. Seriously. Just me and the very lonely road.
6. And the nagging worry that I’d end up running the wrong direction for miles and miles without knowing it.
7. In writing, we call this foreshadowing.
8. So there are lots of hills in Decorah.
9. OH MY ODIN THERE ARE HILLS.
10. But they’re nothing compared to the all-but-literal MOUNTAIN that started about mile 5 1/2.
11. MOU. NTAN.
12. Just hills and hills and trees and the road and me.
13. And at one point two startled deer.
14. Plus my irrational worry that I’d encounter a marauding band of feral gnomes who’d abduct me and I’d never be seen again except for occasional sightings of me in a chin beard and gnomey hat under a bridge.
15. Irrational.
16. Except it WAS Nordic Fest so the gnomes might have been emboldened and hungry.
17. But let’s not think about that.
18. Because there’s no such marauding bands of feral gnomes, right?
19. Anyway ...
20. The mountain kept going up and up and up.
21. And then you’d go around a bend and there’d be even more up.
22. But finally there was a plateau.
23. With a rough-hewn rock that had been mowed around in a figure 8.
24. Again: foreshadowing.
25. So the road started going downhill.
26. Finally.
27. FINALLY.
28. The road eventually came to a fork.
29. The official Elveløpet directional arrow sign that had been stuck in the ground at this fork CLEARLY said to go left.
30. Which felt wrong, but I was so turned around that I had no faith in my sense of direction.
31. Foreshadowing.
32. There’s that word again.
33. So I went left.
34. And the road started getting uphilly again.
35. Let me interrupt this gripping narrative to mention that I’d been maintaining an 11:30 pace through my entire Alpine adventure to this point.
36. I’d expected to run a 12:00 pace, so 11:30 was both an awesome surprise and a genuine motivator to maintain my sprightly clip.
37. Though it was clearly epically slower than the collective pace of the other 99 Elveløpet 15K runners.
38. Because they were so far ahead of me that I was ALL ALONE on this winding, forest-of-trees mountain.
39. That was surely crawling with marauding bands of feral gnomes.
40. But back to our story ...
41. So I’m going up and up the mountain of hills, thinking it’s awfully odd that I’ve run a good two miles almost entirely uphill and it’s already mile 7 and I’d better get downhill soon so I can get all the way back to the finish line, which doesn’t seem at all like it’s only 2 miles away.
42. Oh, yay! I seem to finally reached a plateau.
43. Look at that interesting rough-hewn rock that’s been mowed around in a figure 8.
44. Hey—wait a minute ...
45. FUCK.
46. Yup.
47. That left-pointing arrow just sent me on mile-and-a-half repeat loop.
48. So I am no longer running the 15K course that had been mapped out.
49. So I am officially no longer running the race.
50. And now I’m so behind that the finish line may be dismantled and abandoned by the time I get there.
51. Again with the damn foreshadowing.
52. But at least it’s new and different foreshadowing.
53. In the mean time, I have no other option but to keep running and hoping I circle back to that FUCKING WRONG left arrow and see what happens if I go right.
54. Which I did.
55. Still having no clue if it would get me back on course or get me totally lost.
56. In the land of marauding bands of feral gnomes.
57. It’s amazing what a volatile mix frustration, uncertainty and mounting anger can be when you need extra power to fuel a long run.
58. Long story short: Turning right got me back on track.
59. For a whole mile.
60. Then the arrows just disappeared entirely.
61. But I had no way of knowing that.
62. Until a dude on a bike saw me and told me I’d run way past the turn to the finish line.
63. I had to trudge through a hay field to get to the trail I needed to be on to get back on track.
64. A FUCKING HAY FIELD.
65. By then I’d on-good-faith run 10.3 miles of a 9.3-mile race.
66. I was exhausted.
67. And hot.
68. Because I was finally out in the sun.
69. And pissed.
70. Because through no fault of my own I technically hadn’t run the race I’d been dreaming about running for 20+ years.
71. So FUCK IT.
72. I walked the rest of the way back.
73. Which ended up being a whopping 1.5 miles.
74. Which almost adds up to a 12-mile journey.
75. Remember that foreshadowing about the finish line?
76. Well, it hadn’t been dismantled and abandoned, as I worried it would have been.
77. But it HAD been pulled off the street onto the grass so the street could be reopened to traffic.
78. Some dude was fucking still standing there with a fucking bullhorn and he fucking announced to fucking NOBODY that I crossed the finish line.
79. At this point I was furious.
80. Plus I was far enough from the long-abandoned starting line that I had no idea where I was.
81. But after I finished my Gatorade—I always run with a Gatorade in my hand—and found a bathroom, I calmed down a bit.
82. Because my half-marathon training schedule had me supposed to be running 10 miles this weekend.
83. Which I totally did in today’s 9.3-mile race.
84. And by the transitive power of holy shit when will these hills ever end, that number is more like 13.1.
85. Which—coincidentally—is the exact distance of a half marathon.
86. So I’m totally on track for rocking the half I’m running over Labor Day.
87. Eyes. On. The. Prize.
88. So I’ve decided to look at all of this as I ran the Elveløpet ... plus a lot more.
89. I’m sorry I don’t have an actual finishing time.
90. Because this race was ROUGH and BRUTAL and OTHER ROUGH AND BRUTAL WORDS so it’s totally a one-and-done.
91. But the shirts are awesome.
92. And I know I conquered some killer terrain at a better-than-expected pace for a good 7 miles.
93. Which I’m really thrilled about.
94. And also a little proud of.
95. Plus I rewarded myself with gluttonous amounts of sweet rømmegrøt pudding afterward, which was my only other goal of the trip.
96. Plus the Nordic Fest parade was more delightful and fun and even stirring than I had any idea it would be.
97. I love my cool-fun-proud-and-sometimes-goofy Norwegian heritage.
98. Except for its inability to point simple arrow signs in the right direction.
99. And ALL THOSE HILLS.
100. And it goes without saying its penchant for stirring up marauding bands of feral gnomes.

Theater program notes: Kinky Boots

Published April 13, 2018, for the Broadway national tour of Kinky Boots at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium.

Dragging drag into the spotlight: What does it mean beyond falsies and fierceness?
By Jake Stigers


“We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”

This famous—well, famous to those of us who pay attention to such things—quote by RuPaul in her 1996 book Lettin it All Hang Out: An Autobiography defined a new sensibility of and modern perspective on the evolution of drag writ large in a culture where it has exploded from gay-bar entertainment to mainstream art form. RuPaul is, of course, the towering, flawless-skinned doyenne of the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has enjoyed nine blindingly sequined seasons pitting expertly contoured drag-queen contestants against each other in a lip-synching-for-their-lives battle to be crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar.

So what exactly is drag?

Before we go any further, I want to make some distinctions: Drag queens, as you’re about to see in Kinky Boots, are essentially—and this paragraph is written in very general terms to provide very basic information for people who might not possess this understanding—men who dress as women for the sake of performing. They are different from transvestites, who are men (or women) who for any number of reasons enjoy dressing as women (or men) in private or in public. And transsexuals are people who feel that they were born the wrong gender and who undergo any degree of transformations from basic outward appearance to hormone therapy to surgery to change their genders … and then usually dress and live as completely as possible in those new genders.

Also before we go any further, I—your tall, not-at-all-petite writer—also want to offer some of my drag bona fides: I have dressed in drag on stage (I once rocked a black leotard and heels playing Velma Kelly in a loving re-creation of Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango” with the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus), I have dressed in drag in public (I attended a Christmas-drag-mandatory birthday party populated by ten sturdy, ridiculously-not-pretty drag queens dressed in various degrees of red-and-green tragedy at an otherwise respectable restaurant), I have dressed in drag at home (because walking fiercely in heels doesn’t just happen by magic), and given this vast experience in the drag world I eventually decided I needed my own drag name (Porcelain Bidet, thanks for asking).

So back to our question: What exactly is drag?

In the current popular-culture definition—and, again, in Kinky Boots—drag is men dressing and performing as women not to try to be women but to celebrate and elevate and experience the inherent fabulousness of women. And these men do drag for any number of reasons: Performing only as men is limiting, breaking gender constructs is subversive and provocative, bringing out an inner diva is both liberating and fierce, being a drag queen is just another role to play for an actor or singer or dancer … or sometimes men do drag just because it’s a whole lot of fun. Aside from wearing heels, of course. Because ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Ouch.

You can even parse drag into any number of subsets:

Comedic drag, like comedian Harvey Korman cross-dressing just to be silly in a decade of skits on The Carol Burnett Show.
Tragic drag, like actor Harris Glenn Milstead’s inspiredly disturbing drag character—and director John Waters’ muse—Divine in movies like 1974’s Female Trouble.
Gimmick drag, where men play women less for plausibility and more to drive wacky-hijinks plotlines, like Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon unconvincingly donning frocks to escape the mafia in the 1959 movie Some Like it Hot, or Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari gussying up to save on rent in a not-very-observant-girls-only apartment building from 1980 to 1982 in the mercifully short-lived TV show Bosom Buddies.
Fabulous drag, which is an umbrella term for the work of all the men who dress as women, shimmer in the spotlight and reach for the stars in Kinky Boots, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and every gay bar in America with a stage and a good sound system.

We can also delineate a difference between drag on a stage and drag in public. While stage drag is about creating a character or performing as an idealized persona, drag in public—which, again, is entirely different from cross-dressing as a transvestite to feel comfortable or as a transexual person in an effort to achieve some level of “passing”—is usually done in the spirit of dressing in a costume just to have fun … or even perhaps to provoke a person-to-person response from people.

If we look at drag as something that provokes a response or makes an impression, it can mean practically anything. If I—a man who defaults to T-shirts, cargo shorts and old running shoes whenever possible—walk down the street instead in a black suit or a Santa hat and a red Speedo or a bunny outfit or a marabou-trimmed sweater and a skirt made from a repurposed poinsettia tablecloth—all of which I have done—I’m essentially wearing a costume that influences people either consciously or unconsciously to see—and react to—me in a certain way. Again: We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.

And then there’s the matter of what constitutes women’s clothing and what constitutes men’s clothing at any point in time. A mere 250 years ago, America’s Founding Fathers—like all their gentlemen contemporaries—wore heels, stockings and curled wigs ... all of which are articles of dress that only America’s mothers—and daughters and all women, of course, but I’m trying to use a clever father-mother parallel here—conventionally wear today. So at what point did these modes of dress cease to be men’s, start to be women’s, and then become iconic and fabulous enough to be appropriated by drag queens?

The cultural history of what constitutes drag for women doesn’t offer a clear parallel distinction, though; from a modern gender-conforming perspective, men wear pants and women wear dresses. But women also wear pants. Though it wasn’t always this binary. There were American laws enacted as recently as 1907 that forbade women from wearing trousers in public. It wasn’t until Marlene Dietrich was splashed all over the fan magazines wearing a black tuxedo to a 1932 movie premiere that attitudes toward women in pants started to shift; a year later, Eleanor Roosevelt presided over the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn wearing riding pants, and Vogue magazine published its first photos of women wearing slacks in 1939. And even though professional women were wearing menswear-inspired pants and suits by the 1970s, it wasn’t until 1993—that’s not a typo—that women were allowed to wear trousers on the U.S. Senate floor. (That last bit of information doesn’t really pertain to this narrative, though. I just stumbled on it in my research and found it flabbergasting enough that I thought it was worth sharing.)

Anyway, for the last half-century, women have been wearing menswear-style clothing in both casual and formal settings. So drag kings—women dressing and sometimes performing as the male counterparts to drag queens—have to be more and more diligent (and creative) in defining their drag-king personas.

It is at this point that a thorough, responsible researcher and writer would incorporate into his narrative the gender-appropriating fads of man-buns, guyliner and George Michael’s hair in his WHAM! years. I, however, will not.

So take a moment to look past the drag queens and their stories in Kinky Boots and notice the other characters and what they wear … and how it influences—or is influenced by—their stories. Then think about the story you tell every time you choose something to put on. Because even if it doesn’t include sequins or break the bounds of gender conformity, it would be a total drag if you didn’t celebrate the story it tells about you.


Jake Stigers is a writer, editor, blogger and performer living in Cedar Rapids. Porcelain Bidet is now permanently retired from performing and resides in a box somewhere in the attic.

Run-on sentence? Try GUN-on sentence.

When your dad is in the hospital (bronchial infection/COPD complications, not flu, not pneumonia, almost certainly coming home tomorrow) and while you’re visiting him this afternoon the nurse blows out a vein doing a saline push and after you go home for a while and come back to visit him tonight the hospital finally sends an A-Team nurse to tap a vein and when the nurse comes in the room he kind of takes your breath away because he looks like the deceptively wholesome college football player who answers the doorbell to find the boyishly innocent pizza delivery guy standing boyishly innocently there on that really hot day in that one movie and where was I oh yeah so this super-hunky nurse comes in with an actual ultrasound machine that he uses to virtually spelunk your dad’s arm for a heretofore uncharted vein and he taps it on the first try like a boss and then he works into the conversation that he and his wife have popped out four kids in rapid succession so you’re pretty sure he won’t be ordering any pizza from you if you know what I mean and after he leaves you hang out with your dad and mom for a bit and since you have no friends or pretty much no life or interests to occupy your time you go to the gym all by yourself on a Saturday night all by yourself on a Saturday night dear god what kind of loser goes to the gym all by himself on a Saturday night but the two benefits of going to the gym all by yourself on a Saturday night are there’s nobody there to take your weights or Judgey McJudgerson judge you if you take a couple gym selfies and let’s not kid ourselves here of course you’re going to take a couple gym selfies and also you don’t have to be embarrassed when you track in a bit of slush that melts on the gym floor but the downside is there’s nobody in charge there who can change the crappy music that’s that mix of rap and R&B where effete pre-teens with bilateral lisps mumble mostly incoherently about girls being fine over sloppily mixed samples of public-domain El DeBarge elevator music tracks which is as motivating as the already-used-by-you-but-then-casually-refolded-by-the-waiter cloth napkin you find at your table when you come back from your second trip to the buffet but you still manage to rise above those buzzkill challenges and have such a brutal arm workout that you’re almost obligated to take those gym selfies to commemorate the evening but let’s still not kid ourselves you were going to take those gym selfies anyway so you do and then you head right to Facebook to post the two that make your arms look the biggest and your waist look the smallest because you can’t decide and you desperately don’t want to let go of the delusion that you look like you’re 38 even though you’re going to be 50 in two months the end and I don’t mean the-end-you’re-going-to-fade-into-irrelevance-and-die-because-you’re-turning-50 I just mean the end of this brief story. The end.

Living in the past

We've been volunteering all day at MoShow, the annual epic show-choir competition—starring my supernova-talented niece and nephew, not that I'm biased—at my alma mater. I spent the morning wiping up tables in the cafeteria, which was overrun with polite, tidy, eternally selfish schoolkids who barely spilled a drop of soda or smooshed a dollop of ketchup on the tables for me to clean up. How do you think that made ME feel? What kind of considerate, self-policing monsters are parents raising these days? Rude.

OBSERVATION: Every high-school girl in the world has long, straight hair. With the occasional wisp of coy waviness for the really out-there brazen girls. But otherwise, judging by their hair, every high-school girl in the world is the same person.

OBSERVATION: Our country is mired in a socially and morally devastating epidemic of high-school boys who feel empowered to make gravely unfortunate hairstyle choices. Gravely unfortunate fluffy hairstyle choices. With chunky Monkees profiles and enough bangs to require a background check and a gun permit.

But the real story of course is that the event is called MoShow and I'm a big ol' Mo and that's all anyone really needs to bring the narrative of this story rightfully to me.

To wit: Today's show-choir competition was held in my high-school gym and everyone had to walk through the crammed-with-50-years-of-photos athletic hall of fame to get there and nobody in the rational universe knows why but I was on the varsity gymnastics team when I was a freshman (don't laugh) without having ever had even three-quarters of a second of gymnastics training but a lifetime of sub-zero natural talent (I said DON'T LAUGH) and we took state that year and there's now and forever enshrined in the Washington High School athletic hall of fame a state-champion team photograph of my lithe, toned, muscular teammates looking proud and confident and accomplished in their form-fitting leotards with me grinning cluelessly in the background in my droopy, misshapen leotard looking not unlike a 13th-century desiccated corpse in a mold-eaten Mayan burial gown. 

So naturally the only picture I'm posting of today's myriad adventures and accomplishments is of me standing still just as cluelessly in front of that state-champion team picture in my high school's athletic hall of fame and being caught in a weird emotional purgatory between feeling like I've stayed too long at the wrong party and feeling strangely proud that I did something completely ridiculous and out of character for me and even though the most charitable metrics would clearly show I royally sucked at it, I somehow didn't quit and now I'm enshrined in a droopy leotard melting alluringly off my little goblin shoulders in the photo timeline of my high school's athletic hall of fame:

Oh—and just down the hall from that photo, my supernova-talented niece and nephew rocked their choir performances today and made me prouder than any old athletic display ever could.

IN WHICH OUR PROTAGONIST GETS ALL EMOTIONAL

Abandon all hope ye who enter here. You've been warned.

So my favorite place to sit—which is a sadly rare option—at a vocal rehearsal is right behind the piano, especially if it's being played by a spectacularly talented and indulgently loud pianist like the always marvelous Damon. The back of a piano is pretty much a mattress-sized speaker that can hit you with a wall of glorious sound when it's being played by a heavy-handed virtuoso and you're sitting eagerly a few feet away drinking it all in. And I've been hogging all the goosebumpy magic from my perch in that now not-so-secret prime real estate this week at Follies rehearsals.

And if you're in Follies and you're reading this and you ever—EVER!—take my spot I will give you the biggest paper cut you've ever had. Right on your page-turning finger. Plus I will personally bring to life your paralyzing nightmare that it's opening night and the curtain rises and the music starts and the spotlight hits you and everyone's watching and you realize you forgot to put on your costume and you never learned the words or the choreography to your big solo. Which you probably stole from me anyway. SO DON'T TEST ME.

Anyway, on to my next emotional happy place:

Everyone knows that "Circle of Life" shines high in the pantheon of lush, gorgeous, emotionally manipulative musical-theater power anthems. If you've ever seen the Broadway production of The Lion King you know damn well that before the song even hits its first chorus every last drop of unflinching delight in you has bubbled to the surface and you've all but clapped your hands in joyous childlike glee. And if you deny it, just remember I know how to inflict wicked paper cuts.

Anyway.

I've enjoyed the repeated privilege of singing "Circle of Life" surrounded by armies of shamelessly like-minded singers who are not above belting the loud parts a little too loud just because. And you know who you are. And I will never rat you out as long as you come sing next to me.

Anyway. Get back to your story, Jake. Come on. Focus.

So the first time I sang "Circle of Life" was in the Follies of 1999. Rehearsals started that January and the show opened the first weekend of March. I actually co-choreographed the show with my endlessly creative and talented friend Carol, and she crafted "Circle of Life" with layers of stirring possibility and blossoming organic movement and triumphant fruition that finished in a thundering final drumbeat with me actually hoisting a beaming child to my shoulder. And it unfailingly filled the sumptuously rococo 2,000-seat Paramount Theater with all the unflinching delight and joyous childlike glee I accused you of having three paragraphs ago.

But every night the song—that moment—meant much more to me. Emotionally more. Deliriously more. Catching-an-uncontrollable-sob-in-my-throat more.

My dad's mom had had a massive stroke years before and had been living ever since trapped in whatever her post-stroke world embodied in a Denver nursing home with a breathtaking view that I like to think she was still able to enjoy. She died January 25, 1999, and all of us were able to make it to Denver to give her a peaceful farewell. And afterward I headed back to Iowa and back to Follies.

The morning we opened, my sister went to her eight-month doctor checkup in Detroit in preparation for the pending birth of my nephew. And she learned that she was dangerously low on amniotic fluid and she needed to deliver the baby then and there. My nephew was born very soon afterward on March 5, 1999. I called my sister late that afternoon before I headed to the theater and heard him breathe and gurgle and sigh for the first time as he lay on her chest.

And that night, as the opening chants of "Circle of Life" started building and the gorgeous harmonies in the orchestra and chorus started blooming and "From the day we arrive on this planet" started verbalizing the eternal, universal cycle of life and death and life, the realization gradually washed over me that my family had solemnly liberated one life and joyously welcomed another as I was creating this show and relishing in my enjoyment of this glorious song that celebrated the very process my family and I had just experienced.

And my resigned sorrow and transcendent joy together brought me to a place of emotional and spiritual and physical apotheosis that night on the stage surrounded by my talented friends as we beamed with shared pride all the way to the top balcony. And then I got to experience it again the next night. And every time I've sung the song thereafter.

We're singing "Circle of Life" in Follies again this year. And while I'm eagerly looking forward to experiencing that welcomely familiar flood of emotion again on stage surrounded by my talented and sometimes unrepentantly too loud friends as we share the joy of singing the song over a full orchestra to an audience of 2,000 friends, loved ones and strangers, for now I'm content relishing the simple joy of singing it from my happy place right behind the piano.

Movies: La La Land

One glorious four-act symphony of jazz riffs rendered in music, choreography, plot, cinematography, character development, set decoration, visual composition, movie-musical quotes, leitmotifs and relentless, thoughtful, loving attention to detail. It flatters its audience by trusting us to connect the dots, celebrates the unbridled joy of spontaneously breaking into song, and winks self-awarely at the adorably implausible plot holes that make personal finances fluid and Doris Day parking plentiful and tap shoes and story arcs and even gravity appear and disappear without regard for any scripted accountability. And though there are some wispy singing voices and some not-quite-synchronized soundtrack-to-visual issues and poor Emma Stone seems to walk miles and miles and miles in unforgiving stilettos, La La Land is hands-down one of the most glorious movies I've ever seen.

ChicagoRound: Iroquois Theatre

Chicago emerged from its devastating Great Fire on October 10, 1871, after a two-day conflagration that destroyed 17,500 buildings over four square miles, left 90,000 of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless and killed an impossible-to-quantify-accurately 200–300 people.

And the city immediately began rebuilding.

Thirty-two years and two months later, after rising both literally and proverbially from its ashes to reclaim its place as one of America’s most populous and vital cities, Chicago was devastated by another fire … this time in the month-old, state-of-the-art, “fireproof” Iroquois Theatre.

When it opened on November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and a jewel in the crown of Chicago’s theater scene. Designed in the highly ornate French baroque style, it featured grand staircases, gilded ornamentation, lush velvet curtains and a 6,300-square-foot domed auditorium with a dropped stage to improve the sightlines from every seat in the house. And though it was billed confidently as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois contained almost no fire-safety features. No fire alarm. No backstage telephone. No labeled fire exits (most exits were hidden behind velvet curtains anyway). Even its supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was made of a highly flammable wood pulp. (Less than ten years later, the “unsinkable” Titanic would succumb to a similarly overconfident hubris.)

The theater’s opening production was a touring musical pastiche called Mr. Bluebeard, which featured a 400-person cast and starred popular Vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy. It had enjoyed critical and popular success for over a month when its December 30 audience filed in on a freezing Wednesday afternoon during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Since the theater’s opening had been delayed repeatedly, its owners were desperate to make up for lost revenue, so they oversold the house, seating extra patrons up and down the aisles in the orchestra and balconies.

The fire started at the top of Act II when an overhead light shorted and sent sparks leaping to a nearby curtain. As the fire spread through the flylines and burning bits of scenery rained down on the stage, the actors continued soldiering through their performance, confident in their understanding that the theater was fireproof. A handful of people in the audience got nervous enough to leave, but many chose to stay in their seats (or aisles) until it became obvious the fire was not going to be contained.

And then panic set in.

The ensuing stampede up overcrowded aisles through an unfamiliar theater with hidden exits left trampled bodies everywhere. And since most of the Iroquois exit doors opened inward, the bodies piled up in front of the doors, leaving no hope of escape.

The actors, too, created their own stampede to find exits. And when they finally pried open the giant freight door on the north end of the stage, the arctic winter blast that blew into the building combined with the fiery gases above the stage to create a superheated fireball that exploded into the auditorium and incinerated everything in its path, including hundreds of people still in their seats.

Many of the people who did manage to get out of the building found themselves trapped high in the air on unfinished fire escapes. As these fire escapes got more and more crowded, people begin to fall (or jump) to their deaths in the alley below. By the time the fire was over, bodies were piled 10 deep in what is still called to this day Death Alley.

Though it was contained to one building and it burned less than an hour, the fire killed over 600 people (twice the number killed in the two-day Great Fire of 1871), shut down theaters around the world out of fire-safety concerns (leaving thousands of actors and theater employees unemployed), generated worldwide outpourings of sympathy, exposed yet another Chicago corruption scandal in the years of ensuing lawsuits, and ultimately brought about great changes in the way we respond to massive disasters and catalogue and identify disaster victims. It even inspired an Indianapolis hardware salesman named Carl Prinzler, who randomly had to miss the deadly performance, to invent what he called the Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt once he learned that a disproportionate number of victims had died in desperate piles in front of the inward-opening exit doors with confusing European-style bascule locks. Known today as the “panic bar,” his invention—along with outward-opening exit doors—are perhaps the biggest public-safety legacy of the Iroquois disaster.

Today, the stunning Asian-baroque Oriental Theatre [update: now the James M. Nederlander Theatre] sits pretty much on the exact footprint of the Iroquois Theatre. A thriving part of the Broadway in Chicago theater collective, it features touring productions that play year-round to thousands upon thousands of theater patrons who largely have no idea that they’re sitting on a historic graveyard of sorts. To my knowledge there isn’t even a memorial on the property commemorating the fire.

There is a memorial about three blocks away, in Chicago’s classical-revival City Hall building. Designed by Chicago sculptor Laredo Taft, the bas-relief plaque currently sits above a glass column that houses a revolving door, so it’s both hard to see up close and hard to photograph, especially with an iPhone.

Thankfully, it’s accompanied by an eye-level plaque that explains it context and memorializes the 600 lives lost on December 30, 1903, in one of the worst theater disasters in history.

ChicagoRound: The John Hancock Center

Chicago’s most recognizable skyscraper, with its delicate tapering and its iconic X-bracing, is only the city’s fourth tallest building.

Erected between 1965 and 1970, the Hancock Center actually sits on landfill from Chicago’s great 1871 fire. As legend has it, a mountebank named George Wellington "Cap" Streeter ran his steamboat aground on a sandbar 450 feet off Chicago’s north shore in 1886, convinced post-fire contractors to dump debris between the shore and his boat, and over the decades sold deeds and collected taxes on the growing mass of landfill he called the United States District of Lake Michigan.

The area is today called Streeterville, and the Hancock Center reportedly occupies the spot where Cap Streeter’s boat stood for over a decade.

100 stories tall, the Hancock Center houses stores, restaurants and about 700 condominiums. That swirly structure behind the building in this awesome satellite photo is the ramp to the parking garage, which sits on floors 4–12.

ChicagoRound: Essanay Studios

Most people—heck, most Chicagoans—don’t realize it, but Chicago was an important player in the development of America’s motion picture industry. And the Chicago studio that was once home to early film legends like Gloria Swanson, G.M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson and Charlie Chaplin—along with screenwriter-turned-Hollywood-gossip-columnist Louella Parsons—still stands in Chicago’s storied Uptown neighborhood:

Essanay Studios—founded in 1907 as the Peerless Film Manufacturing Company but eventually renamed Essanay after the initials (S and A) of its founders, George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. Anderson—turned out about 2,000 shorts and features between 1907 and 1917.

Its first film, An Awful Skate, or The Hobo on Rollers, was produced in and around its first studio location at 946 Wells Street (now 1300 N. Wells after Chicago changed its street numbering system in 1908). It starred Ben Turpin, who was then the studio janitor, and it cost just a couple hundred dollars to make. But it grossed perhaps as much as $10,000—close to $216,000 in modern dollars—when it was released. Suddenly flush with money and success, Essanay Studios moved to its giant new location—and into its golden age—at 1333-45 W. Argyle St. in 1908.

Chicago’s weather—and it’s always about Chicago’s weather—along with the growing popularity of westerns, also prompted Essanay to open what they called the Essanay-West Studio in Niles, California in 1913.

The Chicago studio produced many of Essanay’s most famous movies, including:
• The first A Christmas Carol (1908)
• The first Jesse James movie, The James Boys of Missouri (1908)
• The first American Sherlock Holmes (1916)
• And some of the world’s first cartoons, including a popular character called Dreamy Dud

Aside from Anderson, Chaplin, Parsons and Swanson, other notable (to some, but I had to look them up) Essanay alumni include Edward Arnold, Wallace Beery, Francis X. Bushman, Lester Cuneo, Helen Dunbar, Ann Little, Tom Mix, George Periolat, Rod La Rocque, Ben Turpin, Virginia Valli and director Allan Dwan.

Chaplin actually lived in Chicago for less than a month and filmed only one notable movie here: His New Job. But his is the most famous name associated with the studio, and it lives on in the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium of St. Augustine College, which occupies the site today.

Esssanay Studios dissolved in 1918, but the building still stands on a leafy residential street. It was designated a Chicago Landmark with this plaque on March 26, 1996:

ChicagoRound: AT&T Corporate Center

Here’s my reward for getting up at 5:45 every morning to meet my trainer: a glorious, neck-straining view of Chicago's tallest building peeking out from behind its fifth-tallest building as the sun rises over the steel-and-stone canyons of the Loop:

That’s Willis Tower (née Sears Tower) in the center. At 108 floors, it’s the tallest building in the United States and the seventh tallest building in the world. Completed in 1974, it comprises nine square tubes bundled into a 3x3 footprint and rising to different heights with dramatic, efficient setbacks. You can clearly see the two tallest tubes in this picture ... though from this perspective they don't look at all like they tower over the city.

(The next three tallest Chicago buildings in order are the brand-new 96-floor Trump International Hotel and Tower, the 83-floor Aon Center and the 100-floor John Hancock Center.)

The building on the right is the fifth-tallest building in Chicago and the taller half of the 61-story AT&T Corporate Center complex, which is actually two buildings (the other is the 35-story USG Building) connected by a grand (and I mean over-the-top, Art-Deco-meets-Prairie, worth-a-stop-to-stare-up-and-gawk grand) 16-story atrium.

Constructed in 1989, the AT&T Corporate Center effortlessly represents the personality and exuberance of postmodern architecture. It takes the clean, efficient aesthetics of modernism and elevates them beyond the movement's midcentury austerity with ornament, technique and stylistic references. Obviously the dominant reference here is Art Deco, with soaring verticals, pale colors, dramatic setbacks and low-relief detailing.

Here’s a shot I stole off the Internet showing the complex from the USG Building side. Notice how the vertical channel in the center of each face expands as it rises—a fabulous twist on standard Art Deco detail that makes the building seem both taller and wider:

ChicagoRound: Fort Dearborn

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson bought a massive parcel of land from Napoleon Bonaparte that stretched from New Orleans to what is now the northwestern tip of Montana. While the Louisiana Purchase didn’t include the land that is now Chicago, it made the trade routes through the area—specifically the intersection of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan—significantly more important to the expanding United States.

To protect the area, the army built a fort on the south side of the intersection, across from the cabin of Chicago settler Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable (who was once described to me by a well-meaning Chicago Historical Society docent as “an African-American from Haiti”). The army named its new fortress Fort Dearborn in honor of U.S. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn.

The fort endured as a vital military garrison until August 1812, when it was burned to the ground by the Potawatomi Indians in the aptly named War of 1812.

A second Fort Dearborn was built on the site in 1816. It survived eras of peace and conflict with a number of other tribes until part of it was demolished to make way for a new Chicago River channel in 1832. The rest of the fort was destroyed by a fire in 1857, and the few surviving outbuildings were leveled by the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

Today, all that’s left of the fort are the outlines of its footprint, marked by plaques embedded in the sidewalk where Wacker Drive meets Michigan Avenue:

Here’s what the site looks like today. I took this picture facing north, where Michigan Avenue starts being called “The Magnificent Mile” (but only in marketing materials—I’ve never heard a real person use that term in general conversation).

ChicagoRound: Chicago River, north shore

I love this block where State Street crosses the Chicago River. It houses a fabulous juxtaposition of architectural styles and shapes and ideas.

The roundish buildings in the center of the picture are Bertrand Goldberg's iconic 1964 Marina City towers. Known colloquially as Chicago's corncob buildings, they're most famous to people of a certain generation as the implied office location of Bob Newhart's psychology practice. The twin 65-story towers contain a collective 900 pie-shaped condominiums with semi-circular balconies atop two 19-story spiral parking ramps. The complex comprises two other organically shaped buildings: a mid-rise hotel supported by abstract Gothic arches (hidden by the towers in this picture) and the saddle-shaped House of Blues concert hall, which you can see crouching in the bottom left corner. (Incidentally, the sharp corner sticking up over the House of Blues is my old office building.)

In stark, austere contrast to Marina City's explosion of curves and shapes and movement, the square building to the right (on the other side of State Street) is Mies van der Rohe's 330 North Wabash building (originally the IBM Building). It was finished in 1973, four years after van der Rohe died. This modernist black-box aesthetic clearly espouses van der Rohe's "less is more" philosophy: efficient construction, modern industrial materials, simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color and—above all—a conspicuous lack of ornamentation.

The building at the far right is Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's still-under-construction Trump International Hotel and Tower. Slated for completion in 2009, it promises to become the second tallest building in Chicago, after the Sears Tower. While I loath almost everything about the building's blowhard namesake, I'm really liking this gracefully curved, tastefully shimmery highrise. And I love the way its three setbacks will nod to the heights of the buildings around it: the Wrigley Building, the Marina City towers and 330 North Wabash.

ChicagoRound: City Hall

Chicago's City Hall, built between 1905 and 1911, is a classical revival structure that's both imposing in its heft and nondescript in its standard-issue city-hallishness. It's situated as the old-school corner of a triangle of downtown government buildings that include 1965's black-box Daley Center and 1985's spaceship-in-a-bowl-of-tomato-soup Thompson Center. I've never been beyond the first floor of the City Hall building, but I've always loved its vaulted hallways that maintain their austere symmetry as far as you can see:

Chicago citizens have a range of reasons to visit City Hall, but in my case it's always to clear up fuckups related to owning a car. I spent the last business hours of 2007 traversing these vaulted hallways to pay fines on a license plate sticker that had expired because the renewal form had been sent to my old address. Even though I went in person last January to make sure my address had been updated in every possible city database. Even though I asked repeatedly for confirmation that there was no possible way my old address still existed on something important like maybe a sticker renewal form. But the city's fuckups are always our fault, and I'm now $148 poorer for it all. Which probably was needed to offset the cost of the holiday displays:

ChicagoRound: The Chicago River at Night

I took this picture last night from the LaSalle Street bridge facing east toward the lake. Wacker Drive separates the river from the buildings on the right, but the buildings on the left butt up right to the river with only a small public river walk separating them from the water.

The Chicago River originally flowed into Lake Michigan, but as Chicago exploded in size in the 19th century, the river became a dumping ground for garbage and sewage—especially from the city's massive slaughterhouses. The pollution moved directly into the lake, contaminating the city's fresh water supply and creating severe threats to public health. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago managed to reverse the flow of the river in a remarkable feat of engineering and sheer willpower. While the change stopped the pollution of Lake Michigan, the river continued to be a dumping ground all the way up to 1990, when a cleaning and beautification initiative by Mayor Daley made the river the appealing attraction it is today.

Because the bridges that cross the river are built as flexible bascules that raise and lower to allow boats to pass underneath, they actually bounce when traffic crosses them. So it was impossible for me to get a clear picture of the view last night as I stood on the bridge with cars and buses rumbling past me. But I think the blurry effect is kind of cool.

ChicagoRound: Palmolive Building, 1936

This picture, which I lifted from the Chicago Tribune archives, looks like it was taken near North Avenue looking south toward North Michigan Avenue:

The shiny building in the center of the picture is Holabird & Root's iconic Palmolive Building, at the time one of the tallest skyscrapers in Chicago. It was built between 1927 and 1929 in high Art Deco style with soaring vertical lines, dramatic setbacks and a 97-foot tower topped by the Lindbergh Beacon, which could be seen all over the city and even by airplanes 225 miles away. The Arthur Rubloff Company renamed the burgeoning North Michigan Avenue shopping area the Magnificent Mile in the 1940s in an effort to brand it as a retail destination in consumers' minds. In 1967, the Palmolive Building was bought by Playboy magazine and became the Playboy Building. Two years later, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill built the John Hancock Center on the lot immediately behind the Playboy Building in this picture. At 1,127 feet, the Hancock Center dwarfed the once-mighty Playboy Building, and the beacon had to be turned off so it wouldn't shine directly into the Hancock's residential units. The building was rechristened the Palmolive Building in 2002 when it was converted to high-end condominiums and, of course, high-end retail shops.

ChicagoRound: Water Tower

Chicago's iconic Water Tower on North Michigan Avenue was one of a handful of downtown buildings to survive the 1871 Chicago fire. It originally housed a 138-foot standpipe to equalize water pressure coming from Lake Michigan. The tower was connected to a tunnel leading the then-revolutionary length of two miles into the lake to ensure water coming into the city was uncontaminated by sewage and runoff. The standpipe was removed in 1911 when it was rendered obsolete by the installation of rotary pumps.

The soaring Water Tower and the turreted Pumping Station across the street were modeled by architect William W. Boyington on a medieval castle and constructed of Joliet limestone between 1897 and 1869 in what's called the castellated Gothic style. The two buildings have stood for over a century as symbols of Chicago's resilience after the fire. The ornate tower offers a striking counterpoint to the modern consumer architecture around it, and it looks especially stunning at night:

The Pumping Station is still in use today, though it also houses a visitor welcome center, the Lookingglass Theatre and a Hot Tix office. The Water Tower is now home to a rotating gallery of photographs, and it holds court over a small fountained plaza in a manicured park on the west side of Michigan Avenue. In the winter, the city hangs canopies of lights over the walkways in the park. We took a stroll under the canopies last night after our annual pilgrimage to hear the always-spectacular Chanticleer kick off the holiday season in the Gothic splendor of nearby Fourth Presbyterian Church.

ChicagoRound: Do Not Parking

A homemade sign on a LaSalle Boulevard condo construction site south of North Avenue, in the Old Town neighborhood.

Old Town, just northwest of Chicago's tony Gold Cost neighborhood, was almost completely consumed in the 1871 Chicago fire. It was rebuilt in the Victorian style that was prevalent at the time, and the neighborhood housed some prominent artist colonies in the 1930s. After the neighborhood's so-called "white flight" to the suburbs in the 1950s, it became home to counterculture hippies in the 1960s. Then the gays moved in. And you know what happens once the gays move in: The trendy straight people follow, property values soar and the neighborhood goes into a constant state of renovation. Old Town today is packed with grand old homes, ’60s eyesores and trendy boutiques … along with a few remnants of its counterculture past like The Second City improv/comedy revue, which has occupied a space at North and Wells since 1967.

ChicagoRound: Graceland Cemetery

We took the Chicago Architecture Foundation's two-hour walking tour of Chicago's pastoral Graceland Cemetery on Sunday afternoon. The tour is only ten bucks for non-members, and it gives you a sweeping overview of Chicago history, politics, architecture and society. The cemetery, founded in 1860, was designed by landscape architects H.W.S. Cleveland and Ossian Simonds in the Victorian park style, with winding roads, lush native foliage and man-made lakes that work to create a serene, inviting space for visitors. Everyone who's anyone in Chicago history is buried at Graceland, and many of the monuments and mausolea are architectural icons designed by the city's most famous architects. Here's a mere sample of the architecture and the stories the cemetery contains:

This heavenward-facing angel welcomes visitors to the cemetery. In true Victorian fashion, she's the embodiment of lyric Romanticism, and she becomes so entangled in vines that she has to be hacked free at least once a year.

Lorado Taft's iconic Eternal Silence is perhaps the cemetery's most famous monument. Built in 1909 for the family of Chicago pioneer, hotelier and spooky-boneyard-name titleholder Dexter Graves, it features a hooded figure whose dark receded face stands in arresting contrast to the bright patina of its robes. The monument was recently cleaned and restored, but the face was left dark, presumably to freak out little children who wander too close:

Taft's 1931 Crusader was erected to honor newspaper publisher and philanthropist Victor Lawson. The figure is as solitary and heroic as Eternal Silence, but it features the smoother surfaces and sleeker lines of the Art Deco movement, in contrast to the overwrought turn-of-the-century emotion of Eternal Silence.

Potter Palmer, proprietor of Chicago's iconic Palmer House hotel, is entombed next to his wife, Bertha Honoré Palmer, in a pair of sarcophagi under an austere 1902 Greek revival temple featuring a stately colonnade of pillars. The Honoré family monument, in a Gothic splendor reminiscent of Notre Dame Cathedral, sits just below the Palmer monument. But apparently I forgot to take a picture of it.

Marshall Field's 1906 family plot features a seated figure holding oak leaves, a traditional symbol of strength, in front of a private reflecting pool in a grotto of foliage. The twin caducei on the front of the base are the traditional symbol of the medical profession, but our docent on Sunday said they're also a traditional symbol of commerce. My attempts to confirm this via Wikipedia and dictionary.com only confuse the matter further.

I'm afraid I can't remember whom this monument—featuring the traditional Victorian figures of faith, hope and charity—was built for. But what struck me (and everyone else in our group) was a line of five small headstones at its base marking the remains of an entire family—two parents and three children—who were killed in the Iroquois Theater fire on December 30, 1903. The fire, which started when a lighting fixture ignited a curtain and quickly exploded into a giant fireball, killed 602 people during a matinée of the popular musical Mr. Bluebeard, starring Eddie Foy. The deaths were attributed to corrupt fire inspectors in combination with fire exits that opened inward, trapping everyone inside as bodies piled up against them. This disaster is the reason that all fire doors open outward to this day.

Louis Sullivan is often credited as the creator of the modern skyscraper. The development of cheap, available steel in the last half of the 19th century suddenly allowed buildings to rise higher than architects had ever imagined. And since their outside walls didn't have to bear the weight of the extra floors, they were suddenly free to be ornamental. Sullivan helped define a graceful visual vocabulary for buildings that soared into the outer reaches of perspective, and the mighty skyscraper was born. While Sullivan coined the phrase "form follows function"—meaning a building's practical use should trump superfluous aesthetics—he often gave his buildings lush Art Nouveau or Celtic Revival ornamentation ... like the intricate cast-iron latticework that graces his Carson, Pirie, Scott Building in Chicago and the terra cotta detailing on the Peoples Savings Bank in my hometown. Despite Sullivan's epic achievements in architecture—including some of the most notable monuments at Graceland Cemetery—he died penniless and alone due to his alcoholism and his uneven temperament. And his gravestone is little more than a rock with an ornament bearing his silhouette.

Architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham was the director of works for the 1893 World's Fair (read all about it in Devil in the White City) and the architect of such notable structures as Chicago's Reliance Building, Washington D.C.'s Union Station and New York City's Flatiron Building. He also created the great 1909 Chicago Plan, the first comprehensive blueprint for controlled growth of an American city. Despite his vast, ornate architectural oeuvre, his grave marker is a simple plaque on a rough-hewn stone. But his family plot occupies a private island in the cemetery's Lake Willowmere. Interesting fact: When Lincoln Park Cemetery was deconsecrated in the 1800s and its bodies were reinterred at Graceland, the broken headstones were used to line Lake Willowmere. You can still see etchings on the stones that border the lake.

Ruth Page, the first American ballerina to dance with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, was also the first American choreographer to employ Rudolf Nureyev after his defection from the Kirov Ballet. She helped bring modern dance to the masses, and she worked with some of the early 20th century's most influential artists, including Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland and Anna Pavlova. She's interred in a grotto surrounded by some of Graceland Cemetery's most avant-garde and unusual grave markers, an apt tribute to her life and her work.

Architect Mies van der Rohe founded the International Style, the fabled "less is more" school that eschewed ornament over sleek dark facades and pure functionality. Dirk Lohan's polished granite slab marking his grave echoes the austere aesthetic of van der Rohe's architecture, which includes Chicago's IBM Building and New York City's Seagram Building.