By Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow

Seeing Chicago from your feet is really a perspective in experiencing our city that is unforgettably intimate. Going by bicycle, car, bus or Rollerblade will not do it in the same way. It has to be you, your feet and the city joined in a personal dance that allows you to feel the rhythms of Chicago’s neighborhoods, lakefront and signature skyline. Read the rest of this entry »

By Stephanie Shaw

It is bathing-suit weather, and we have just fended off an attack from our sister-in-law. She is breaking our balls because we refuse to wear a bikini. Our sister-in-law wears a bikini. We point out our age, and our childbearing body, as an excuse. We mention that the super-elastic bubble plastic that once held our abdominal wall together has long since mutinied. We mention that our belly is not the sort of belly one shows off in public. And she says “So what?” And we say, “People will take one look and think that it’s been in a fire. Or some sort of arcane industrial accident out of Stephen King, like it got caught in a laundry mangler, or put through a diabolical sieve.”

Our belly is remarkable. It has accommodated, at various times, an array of infants. Now it hangs loosely from its moorings and it is soft and crinkled and shiny, like a chenille sweater that should be hand-washed but was mistakenly put through the clothes dryer. Our sister-in-law’s brother tells us that it is like velvet, that he shares an important history with it, that it feels good against his belly. He regularly puts his lips on it. We think this is fine, and we tell our husband so, but we tell his sister that we are not prepared to share our remarkable belly with the municipal pool-swimming public, and she tells us that it’s our body and we should glory in it and never mind what anyone else thinks and we think this is a peculiar philosophy, spouting as it does from the pie hole of someone who clearly visits the salon every six weeks to get hot wax poured onto her pubic hair. Read the rest of this entry »

By Martin Northway

It was an L-shaped second-floor apartment in Old Town with a bay window in the crook of the L. It looked southeast with a clear view of the Hancock. My Shaker-simple desk was placed such that I was backed against the gorgeous view. I would pound at my typewriter—no computer as of yet—and fling crumpled wads of paper on the floor till the end of the day because I didn’t have a wastebasket.

It was my summer of writing dangerously. Grieving estrangement from my ex-wife and family in southern Indiana, I’d come back to Chicago’s South Side, labored a while as an A/V scriptwriter along Michigan Avenue and thrown that aside for the urgent need to simplify and write short fiction. The landlord was desperately trying to sell the building and most tenants had fled, but Bad Penny had friends there and brokered a space for me. Cheap, no lease, and the neighborhood was gentrifying all around St. Michael’s “Catlick” Church, whose bell extolled its provenance on the hour. Read the rest of this entry »

By David Witter

Formerly part of the Medinah Athletic Club, the swimming pool at 505 North Michigan is a 1920s Hollywood/Arabian fantasy, complete with gilded fountains and thousands of hand-laid mosaic tiles surrounding a Junior Olympic-sized natatorium. Now belonging to the Hotel Inter-Continental, it has attracted more than its share of celebrities and artists. Built in 1929, the screen’s first Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller showed off his jungle dives there. During the 1940s, screen and swimming siren Esther Williams also graced its waters. But the most notable of these may have been Tennessee Williams. Like “The Night of the Iguana”’s Rev. Lawrence T. Shannon returning to the Pacific Ocean, Williams regularly sought refuge from a hostile, critical world in the pool’s aqua blue waters. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jenny Seay

I don’t know what I expected as I followed Lisa through the dark gangway, past the opening of a rusted, chain-link gate. But I distinctly remember feeling disappointed—the yard, its unkempt grass strewn with beer cans and battered lawn chairs, was nothing like Lisa had described.

She adjusted her purse strap and shoved a thick strand of blonde hair behind her ear before turning to face me.

“You know, it’s not normally this grungy.” Her tone was hushed, but hardly inconspicuous enough to go unnoticed by the boys awaiting our arrival. They snapped to attention, and Dwayne, who had a hopeless crush on Lisa, lumbered over to greet us. Read the rest of this entry »

By Fred Sasaki

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you.
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream)
—From “To a Stranger,” by Walt Whitman

Decapitated heads of tulips lay splayed over decorative beds along Michigan Avenue as spring turns. The summer wind brings in a thrush of color in the teaming multitude of strangers on the Magnificent Mile. Immense in scope, the classification of the species that take the promenade is far beyond the means of a mere article. Such an endeavor demands a Jacques-Cousteau-like depth and a heavy prescription of Xanax. This being my only caveat, I give you a tasting blanket of the more peculiar anamules on parade, from bulbous suburbanites and tourists to the lean and harrowed hags of the avenue. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Summer in Chicago is a food-porn dream.

At the Green City Market in Lincoln Park, a dewy sheen glistens on the tips of nubile spring onions and piles of bulbous Morels with more nooks and crannies than a Bay’s English Muffin spill from wooden barrels. Tender stalks of young white asparagus shoots splay about the farm tables. Verdant fields of leafy greens, bushels of arugula, spinach and mesclun mixes flay open in the morning sun. Rippled heirloom tomatoes burst with striped protuberances. Curlicues of frisee and fresh-cut vines flutter in the summer breeze. Bushels of jeweled apples compete for ocular affection with golden rivers of artisanal olive oils, tarragon vinegars and tubes of creamy ripe goat’s milk cheeses from Capriole farms. An ever-present mineral tang of earthy soils mingles with sweet tomato sauce and the smoky crust of the wood-burning pizzas and freshly grilled panninis. The oat-encrusted loaves of Bennison’s hearth-baked breads cast a yeasty aroma into the mix. Read the rest of this entry »

By Martin Northway

“The whole world is watching,” they chanted: but you didn’t have to be a protester stuck in the “police riot” in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic National Convention to know that Chicago was in the hot crucible of history. You might have been an inquisitive observer like me, a (remarkably perhaps) non-radical University of Chicago undergraduate remaining in Chicago through the summer. By fall, it seemed as if the whole world was exploding—or at least America, as we had known her.

Arriving as a freshman in 1966 with the draft nipping at my heels, I had reported for the upstart, vaguely counterrevolutionary Other. We thoroughly covered a campus appearance by Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was challenging the Vietnam War leadership of President Lyndon Johnson. Once I breathlessly phoned in a radical student leader’s impassioned challenge to the U of C’s cooperation with the Selective Service. She pleaded for “peace, justice … and the democratization of the University” (hints of Superman: you can’t say the Left totally lacked humor). Read the rest of this entry »

I have always felt that the best parks in Chicago can only be reached by bus and don’t have neighborhoods named after them. Indian Boundary Park, located at 2500 West Lunt, is no exception. I have a special connection to the park. Sometime in the late 1980s, I remember watching my parents and neighbors build the maze of wooden castles, bridges, spires and tunnels that comprise its playground, and when my pet rabbit started chewing the wires behind my dad’s stereo, it got a new home in the park’s petting zoo. They nixed the petting zoo a couple years back, but the park still has the only outdoor zoo you’re likely to find on the Far North Side, containing deer, sheep and some very mangy alpaca. On the weekend you can take yoga classes and see no-frills local theater in the old fieldhouse. After hours, the playground is a haven for dog walkers, Latin Kings and high-school kids with no place else to go hang out.

There’s not much else to say about Indian Boundary. It was named after the West Ridge borders established for Potawatomi villages in the early 1800s that were breached just before the turn of the century. It has tennis courts, a lagoon, a geyser-style fountain to play in, and copious elote and paleta vendors. I’ve fallen in love there at three different points in my life.

There are about a hundred days of summer between the solstice and the equinox. Add another thirty for the rise in global temperatures, then subtract twenty for Chicago weather weirdness. That leaves a lot of time to take the Western Avenue bus north for a visit, and if you don’t, it’s practically criminal. (Eric Strom)

I would never say that pulling a scam on an amusement park is a good or honorable pursuit, but if any place is ripe for scamming, it’s Six Flags. It is a place awash in Coed Naked, Big Johnson and Insane Clown Posse T-shirts and every few feet there is an advertisement, or something for sale at 300 percent market value. Mind you, it’s not just the corporation trying to sell you things, it’s all of your favorite Time-Warner-licensed characters, from Batman and Tweety Bird to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, should they ever find a use for him.

My favorite was always The Wheelchair Scam. It’s not really so much a scam as paying fifteen bucks extra for what I call a “super ticket” for yourself and three friends. What you do is you pay for a normal ticket and then go to the Guest Services building (limp there, if you think you can fake it) and tell them you need to rent a wheelchair. Explain why, fill out the forms and give them the money.

It’s a personal preference, but I always made it a point not to portray myself in a positive light, or as seriously infirmed. Example: “I got really drunk last night and jumped off my friend’s roof. I think I sprained my ankle or something.”
They don’t like you, but they give you the wheelchair. Voila! Now, instead of waiting in line, you and your friends can climb up the back way. You’ll be amazed to see how quickly you can exhaust the park.

There are two downsides. One is that someone will get stuck sitting down through an entire hot day of fun. If this sounds relaxing, it isn’t. After a couple hours you will be desperate to get up and move. The second is that, at some point in the day, you will feel like a horrible person. Truth is, you are a horrible person, and you won’t realize it until someone who is bound to the wheelchair year round says, “Don’t worry, you can go ahead of me. I’ll catch the next one.”
Asshole. (Eric Strom)