If you drive a few miles out of downtown Chicago and exit the 101 at Mulholland Drive, you wind up a hill that is so steep that it can't be for anyone except residential traffic. From there, turn left on the dirt path that doesn't look like a road, drive a quarter mile or so, turn into the parking lot (it's the one with the no parking signs -- it's best to do this at midnight), and cut the engine. Get out of the car and hop the gate to your left. Hike another two miles up that path, pass through the gate with the guard tower, and climb the stairs. You're now scaling an abandoned missile silo, probably a thousand feet above street-level Chicago, and as you crest the platform at the top, you'll see the entire city laid out in front of you. Turn around and you'll see the silent, few lights of boats on Lake Michigan. The wind carries your own voice away and you can't hear a word from the city below.
. . .This isn't true.
That is, I'm not giving you directions outside of Chicago. I'm giving you directions outside of Los Angeles, a city whose top I stood on a few months ago. In this respect, the story is true; the silo is there, the lights collapse into each other at the horizon line, and you can't hear any of the shouting Sunset Boulevard you left half an hour before; behind you is the Pacific Ocean, not Lake Michigan. I can pretend that this is Chicago, though, and if you don't know the streets or military history of the city, I can probably pass the story off as true -- but truth be told, it's false.
The question is: Does it matter? Which part of the story is important? The fact that it actually took place in Los Angeles -- and it did actually take place in Los Angeles -- or that something took place that meant something to someone?
Perspective is the key.
One story that is true is that this Chicago voyage has been an interesting exercise in perspective. As a lone blogger tonight, I can reflect a little and say that this is my second year on the trip, and here's one example: Last year, Chicago Public School's spring break coincided with Hamline University's and we worked directly with the youth at Little Black Pearl. We were in their classrooms, in their work spaces, painting alongside them, talking about ourselves while they talked about themselves, and in some cases we even taught them. This year we arrived early, and honestly haven't seen a single student since we set feet in Little Black Pearl. Instead we've been painting, cleaning the ceramics studio, lifting boxes and crates full of tiles, shoveling hundreds of pounds of dried-out clay into dumpsters, washing windows. . . We're doing a lot more hands-on work, and we're not in a position to be making bonds with students. It's not what I expected at all, given last year, and bringing nine people into a space with an established community (out Catalyst trip and Little Black Pearl, respectively), at times throughout the week I felt like we were more in the way than in the right. For me, it became a little disheartening to think that we were helping them more out of convenience than service.
Today was our last day at Little Black Pearl. We washed a lot of windows, hefted more boxes, and took it a little easier into the afternoon. As we came to our lunch break, we were greeted by Leon, who has been our superviser for most of the week, and he took us to the paint studio to get our photo taken. And then suddenly there were people everywhere -- us, everyone we'd worked with for the week, the executive director and founder of the organization. Leon presented us with certificates of appreciation, for both ourselves and for the Wesley Center, and the others thanked us profusely, telling us how much they enjoyed having us in their space, helping them with things that mightn't've gotten done otherwise. They were truly glad that we'd been there; they invited us back; Leon bought us lunch and got us tickets to the Field Museum and hugged us and sent us on our way. I was coming to understand that my idea of how they thought of us was. . .completely wrong.
Perspective. Sometimes, it gets you.
We took it easy this afternoon, but what prompted my revisiting of the missile silo in Los Angeles was that today we went up the Willis Tower -- or Sears Tower, for those like me who are afraid of change. All 100-plus floors of it. For the second time in a few months, I found myself looking down on one of America's major metropolitan areas, stretching off into the distance. It wasn't the height that got me, or the really-super-awesome fifteen-minute movie we got/had to watch before getting into the really cramped elevator and riding 1,450 feet into the air -- but the fact that if I stood right at the window and looked down, I could recognize intersections, this time from directly over them. They were completely different from there, in the middle of the day, surrounded by cameras and fellow tourists. I wasn't blending in with the morning commute, and we weren't dodging a bus. We were lording over the city, almost literally, seeing miles away when we could maybe see a few dozen yards on the ground. We could see our hostel, the entire Loop, miles and miles and miles of cramped highways and avenues, all in a glance.
Perspective.
Exercise three, today alone, was seeing a play this evening. We took in Precious Little, produced by the all-woman Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, at the downtown DCA Theater. The play is acted out by three women, and the plot revolves around Brodie, a middle-aged, lesbian linguist who finds out partway into pregnancy that her unborn child may have a defect preventing her use of language. The three actors rotate among different settings, including a clinic, Brodie's office, and a zoo.
My excitement entering the theatre was that the production was about language; the way it's used; what happens when it can't or won't be used by people. I study communication and creative writing; of course I'm excited about a play that uses language as a central theme. But about ten minutes in, when Brodie and her doctors are talking about medical procedures, I started noticing our staff adviser's reactions. She was muttering things and making gestures at moments that went almost completely by me -- remarks about the tenure system being unfair, moments of medical terminology that were significant internally but outwardly jargon; small details that came back later in larger ways. I don't know if she, the director of Health Services at Hamline, was as excited about the linguistics of the play as I was, but she was finding things in the production that I couldn't have even begun to get a handle on.
Perspective is tricky. Without keeping it in mind, you can completely miss out on appreciating moments in which what you think is different from what someone else thinks -- but if you think too hard about all the ways to realize things, you can lose the way you react to and interact with the things happening around you. But I'm trying to find that balance between, and from the conversations we've been having around the hostel -- and in restaurants, and waiting for the L, and passing from place to place on the Magnificent Mile or riding the bus between Hyde Park and Wicker Park --, it seems like the people I'm exploring the city with (in so many ways) are, too. We're trying to keep myself present in Chicago while remembering that eventually, we're going back to Saint Paul. We're trying to let ourselves judge a piece of art while engaging in discussions about the way other people, people growing closer to us by the day, are judging them -- and at the same time trying to be objective and fair.
We're trying to understand our places in spots like Little Black Pearl and the arts community itself. Whether these are places we fit awkwardly or places we'll never even try to re-enter at all once we get back home, we're learning what we think, taking in what's offered to us and what we've sought out on our own, and we're trying.
And hey, we're doing pretty well -- at least from our perspective.
Lewis.
From there we went back to the hostel and had a brief lunch of leftovers:]
lues for good food and blues of course!
