We're in the Hot Stove period now between the end of the baseball season and the start of Spring Training, which is when the news pour in more than the stats.  But even for those whose eyes roll wearily at any time when  baseball is mentioned, this still this is notable.

The Chicago Cubs just hired Rachel Folden as a hitting coach for Rookie League. She's believed to be the first woman on a coaching staff in a MLB organization.

"She's going to be a star.  She's the first person I brought in for an interview," said Justin Stone, Cubs hitting director, adding "Rachel's been working alongside me for the last couple years, and there is nobody more confident.  You worry, or you take a second thought of, 'How are guys going to react to the first time they've ever been coached by a woman in their life?' Rachel's the perfect person to cross this barrier, because not only is she one of the most talented people in our industry, she's extremely confident. And, if somebody gives her crap, she'll get in the cage and probably outswing them."

​You can read more about it here.

WGN television carried Chicago Cubs baseball games for 72 years!  To put in perspective how remarkable that is, television hasn't been broadcasting much longer than that.  However, the other day was their last game, since the Cubs will have their own cable network starting next years.

Thanks to Eric Boardman who sent me a heads-up to this video tribute that WGN made as a tribute to its long history broadcasting baseball and the Cubs.

That said, much as I enjoyed the piece, I think it's only fair.  Too much is just generic about how one broadcasts a game, any game.  And they show very few highlights that have occurred over seven decades   But mostly, there is more focus on Harry Carey than Hall-of-Famer Jack Brickhouse.  Though Harry is far better known to most Americans through the WGA superstation, he only covered the team for 17 years.  A long time, to be sure, but Jack Brickhouse announced their games for 33 years.  Further, for 20 of those years on WGN, Jack didn't just broadcast the Cubs, but also the White Sox.  So, for 20 years, he did the play-by-play of both the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox!!

Since this is a piece on WGN broadcasting the Cubs, I don't fault them for not referencing the White Sox.  But they sure could have focused more on Jack Brickhouse broadcasting almost half of the station's 72 years with the team.

Happily, he at least is part of the story, and it's handled fairly nicely.  With the baseball season ending on Sunday, here's the tribute.
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Last night before the Chicago Bears football game with their century-old rival the Green Bay Packers game, NBC ran a funny one-minute video honoring the start of the NFL’s 100th season.  It was basically a debate of sorts between Packer-great quarterback Bret Favre and Bill Swirski's Superfans from Saturday Night Live (George Wendt and Robert Smigel), the "Mike Ditka is God and 'da Bearsss' are heaven" guys.  It was very cute, but had an especially-funny end.  I thought I’d see if I could track down the video for a friend who's out of the country at the moment..
 
It turns out that that was only a very short excerpt of a five-minute video!  (Fortunately the video was great fun because da Bears stunk...)
 
Here ‘is the whole thing.

(Side Note:  Robert Smigel's other well-known character is that he's the guy behind Triumpth the Insult Comic Dog.  And here's a fun fact -- Smigel is not an actor, and was nervous about originally playing the character, but when the sunglasses were added, he realized that it would let him read the cue cards without anyone noticing.)

When I was back in Chicago the other week, staying in Evanston to be nearby relatives, I drove a few times through Glencoe where I grew up.  And as I passed the Village of Glencoe sign that welcomes one to town, I noticed that it said -- "Established 1869."  Which meant that this year, it's 150 years old.  So, I figured that that deserves at least some recognition.  It's not a shabby achievement.
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I'm not sure of the population, but it's always been around 10,500, so we'll go with that.  If you want to see about the town's festivities, you can check it out here.  But I'm going to keep this fairly simple and dive in here on my own.

I thought that when a town hits 150 years, especially if you grew up there, it's entitled to fairly good-sized photographic presentation.  So here are a dozen or so to help commemorate the occasion.  Most of these come from about 40 years back when I wandered around town and took some pictures.  To be fair to the town, Glencoe isn't always covered with snow -- it actually can get lush green from the late Spring through the Summer, with brilliant colors in the Fall -- but that's when I chose to walk around and take the photos. 

That's the old library on the left, which is probably my favorite building in town, as much for the outside (it just looks like a library is supposed to) as what's inside -- especially the wonderfully magical downstairs shelves that felt like you were in a hidden cloister -- although the train station is a very close second.

Behind the library, this is the town hall, which I always like for its old world, colonial style, though I still think of as one of the more "modern" of the significant buildings since it's only about 60 years old or so.
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​And this the turn-of-the century train station.  A few years ago I rented the movie Flag of Our Fathers, that Clint Eastwood directed, about the six soldiers who raised the flag at Iwo Jima.  At one point in the film, the soldiers have returned to the U.S. and go on a cross-country tour to raise money for the war effort and are in Chicago.  Eastwood needed a venue that looked out of the 1940s, and when the scene came up I though, "Gee, that looks like the Glencoe station.  Afterwards I did some reserach -- and it was..

​I've always loved this photo, not so much for the visual imaging of it -- though I do like that -- but almost entirely for the sign with states which is significantly the obvious.

The sign and its helpful notification aside, here's a better look at Lake Michigan, and the lovely shores of the Glencoe public beach. Fun fact:  it's more sandy in the Summer.

In fairness, no, the snow wasn't this high, nor were the drifts.  From the plows clearing the streets downtown, this was the result.  By the way, Weinecke's was a beloved hardware store, in town for probably half a century.  The building is still there and -- as a landmark and to keep the tradition, so is the sign -- but it's now a high-end restaurant.

(This was taken during the early afternoon, but the glare off the snow was SO bright that the camera auto-compensated and made it look darker...)

That was then, this is now.  This is Weinecke's today -- now the Guildhall restaurant.  And no, this is not one of my photographs.

Here's a much better, full view of my fave, the venerable old Glencoe Public Library.  Since the vegetation is lush and green, that's the first hint I didn't take the photo.

I've written often here about the acclaimed Writers Theatre in Glencoe, which began life in the back of the bookstore, Books on Vernon, just down the street from Weinicke's, with about 50 seats -- but still got critics from the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times to review of their productions, and even on occasion the New York Times.  It then moved to the far-more special Women's Club a few blocks away, which had a theater space designed for about 120 seats.  (This is where I saw the Harnick and Bock musical She Loves Me I've written about here often that I set up to attend along with Harnick and my aunt, who was his childhood friend and Northwestern classmate, and which starred Jessie Mueller before she went to Broadway and won a Tony Award as Best Actresses.)  A few years back the Wall Street Journal (which has sent critics to review plays here) named it the top regional theater in the country.  The company built up such a following that a few years ago, they did a major fundraising project and built a new, major structure on the spot.  

Grand as it is, they still kept the theaters intimate.  The main stage still only seats around 125 people, and the small stage holds only about 70.  It's further designed so that hey can also convert the lobby into a theater if needed.  Side note: last year I saw the world premiere of an interesting little play called Witch on the small stage, and in a few months the excellent Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles is presenting the play.  When some friends who attend a lot of the Geffen productions asked if I was thinking of going to see the play, I was able to tell them I already had...  And said it was quite good.

This is how far it's come from the back of a book store in a little over 25 years.  For the record, their photographer makes it look far better than I ever could.

Happily, I do have a few photos that I took during the summertime, so I think I should include at least one that shows how lush the forest is in Glencoe, as opposed to all the snow scenes.  This is the Turnbull Woods, part of the Cook County Forest Preserves, which I could reach a very short walk from our house, and where sat the Double Killer Cave my friend and I named and explored as kids.

I've written occasionally of the spectacular Chicago Botanic Garden, which I call the Disneyland of botanic gardens because it's set up into different "lands" and is so expansive that it has trolley tours and a miniature children's train set-up during the Summer.  But though it has "Chicago" in its name, it's actually located in Glencoe.  No single picture can do its magnificence justice, but here are two that I took that gives at least a hint of an idea.

And what the heck, we'll end on a picture of the homestead where I grew up.  That was my brother and my room on the left until we got old enough that he got his own room in the back, and I kept this one.

In many ways, this also served as Elisberg Stadium.  My brother and I played what we called "Fastball Tennis Ball in the driveway against the garage (our version of two-man baseball).  There was a basketball hoop on the garage rather than a standalone backboard -- this was fine, with one caveat: many of the houses in the neighborhood like ours were designed by the Keck firm, who were disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright (who designed some houses in Glencoe.  That meant that the rooftops were flat -- so if a shot went way-wild and landed on the roof, it didn't roll off.  You had to get the ladder to climb up.  However, this help train you to take as good shots as possible and not just fling the ball up in hopeful prayer.  Finally, the front yard served as our football field -- though the tree in the center of the yard made it a wee bit of an obstacle, however if you built it into your strategy it worked well as a high-end blocker.
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Happy 150.

When I went to Chicago the other week, it was for my regular mid-year trip there.  But I timed it specifically so that I could get a ticket for a production of Meredith Willson's The Music Man (to give its full and correct title under the circumstances...) that the acclaimed Goodman Theatre -- a Tony-winner for Best Regional Theatre -- was doing, moreover directed by Marry Zimmerman who is an Artistic Associate of the Goodman, as well as a professor at Northwestern University -- and herself won a Tony Award for directing in 2002.  I was really interested in what they -- and especially she -- would do with the show.  To put this in proper perspective, I not only love The Music Man, which is one of my top-favorite shows, but it was the first professional musical I ever saw when I was a real little kid, performed at the Shubert Theater in downtown Chicago.  It enthralled me then, and has continued to.  I wouldn't precisely call myself an aficionado of the show, but the details matter to me.

(Among the productions of the show I've seen include a memorable one in Los Angeles around 1980 that starred Dick Van Dyke as Prof. Harold Hill.  I wrote about it here, and embedded a video of him performing the song, "Marian the Librarian.")

So, as much as the trip was about going to Chicago, the timing was entirely about The Music Man.
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Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The style was quite different from most productions. Rather than treating the people of River City and the world of the show as archetypes, Zimmerman played it all quite low-key and realistic.  And the staging and set design were almost bare bones, with the production looking somewhat like a painting by Winslow Homer or Grant Wood (the artist of "American Gothic," which is actually written into the number "Iowa Stubborn" as a joke)..  It was very effective and added great charm and believability to the show.

This realistic quality, in turn, impacted the role of Harold Hill, played by Geoff Packard.  There are largely two main ways to play the con man Professor.  One, as performed in the original Broadway production and movie by Robert Preston, is as an out-of-town big city hustler who's come in to steamroll over the small town hicks, and the other is to slyly and deceptively "aw-shucks" ingratiate himself into the town as a good-old-boy one of them.  (This is the interpretation Dick Van Dyke took, as did Matthew Broderick in the TV movie remake.)  I personally prefer the former, because the startk contrast of a fast-talking Hill to the bucolic townspeople is dramatically more effective to me.  Surprisingly, Zimmerman and Packard had an uncommon third way, one that fit the overall low-key realism of the production.  And that's to play Prof. Hill pretty straightforward and present him unapologetically for who he is -- an out-of-town traveling salesman who very openly wants to sell something that no one has expressed any interest in.  It was very intriguing and works quite well in many ways being thoroughly believable -- Packard most definitely does a good job -- though for my taste I think in the end it's not the right way to go.  When Harold Hill is played as a  big city hustler, tries to overwhelm people with exuding charm.  When being slyly ingratiating, he wins over people with his presumed close kinship.  But a traveling salesman selling what you don't need, while fun, isn't overly likable.  And while that works okay for him being able to ultimately sell band uniforms and instruments to a town that becomes convinced by his bamboozling that they need them, it's doesn't work as well when believing that Marian the Librarian will fall in love with him.  We accept that they fall in love because not only does the great structure of the show push us there effusively, but also because we see how moved she is that Prof. Hill has brought her shy, silent little brother Winthrop out of his shell.  So, it works -- but for my taste it doesn't work on every level, because "appreciation" and "admiration" are not the same as love.

That said, the performances were generally extremely good.  Those who stood out for me were Monica West as a terrific Marian Paroo, in a rich, lovely performance (seen below).  Mary Ernster was a wonderful Widow Paroo, her mother.  And Ron E. Rains did a particularly nice job as the blustery Major Shinn.  On a personal level, I also enjoyed seeing Heidi Kettenring chewing up the scenery as the Mayor's wife, Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn (at times a bit much, but it was fun and fit well) -- particularly since I'd seen her eight years ago in a much-more understated and wonderful performance of Harnick and Bock's She Loves Me at the Writers Theatre in Glencoe, a production that starred Jessie Mueller who soon after went on to win a Tony Award as Carole King in Beautiful.

As I said, overall, I thought the production was fresh, unique and very good.  My only real quibbles (beyond how the more realistic style affected the character of Harold Hill) center around two specific directorial choices.

There are perhaps two especially-famous moments of High Musical Theater Drama in the show.  The first is when Harold Hill jumps into the town's Fourth of July rehearsal to convince them all that what they most need is a band that would be filled with "76 Trombones."  And the sequence begins with one particular, dramatic flourish where he brazenly dazzles the staid townfolk by suddenly changing himself -- from an out-of-towner into a mesmerizing bandleader -- and he inverts his very-ordinary sportcoat inside-out which immediately becomes a flashy, bandleader's uniform and punches out the top of his straw hat, turning it into a plumed bandleader's cap.

Here, though, seemingly to be more realistic is my guess, he didn't do that.  He simply had his friend Marcellus open his suitcase, take out a coat and give it to him.  And then picked up a splashy hat.  It was realistic, but it wasn't especially interesting, and wouldn't have galvanized anyone in the gym to follow this,"snake oil salesman,"  as Mayor Shin calls him.  He doesn't magically transform himself.  He put on a coat and hat.

The other is one of the famous High Dramatic moments in musical theater, in a league with when Eliza Doolittle first is able to speak English properly and slowly ekes out the phrase, "The rain in Spain...stays mainly...in the plain" from My Fair Lady.  It comes in The Music Man when little Winthrop, whose lisp and loss of his father has made him near-totally withdrawn and silent, suddenly BURSTS through the entire town, runs to centerstage down by the footlights, and all alone in the spotlight, for maybe the first time in his life, sings with utter, explosive joy about the Wells Fargo Wagon that's about to come to town might actually have "thumthin' thpecial" just for him!!  It's a galvanizing moment in the show (and musical history), which helps cause Marian to fall in love with Harold, as her little brother races over to her afterwards to embrace one another.

Here, though, to be more realistic, he's far off to the side, waiting with everyone for the wagon to arrive, and just takes a steps forward -- stage right, amid the crowd -- to sing his song.  It's a nice moment -- there's no way it can't be -- and realistic and believable, but I don't think it sends the bolt of excitement through the audience which made the moment a classic.  He's happy.  But it's not "thumpthin' thpecial."

And here is a very abbreviated version ​(which they clearly trimmed themselves to fit their two minutes on TV) of "Trouble" performed by the cast on a daytime syndicated show, Windy City Live.

As I always have tried to do on my more recent trips to Chicago -- since I now stay with relatives who live in Evanston, just blocks from the beloved Northwestern University -- I like to walk through the campus which has retained its charm on the shores of Lake Michigan, but added serious construction over the past couple decades.  A bit too built up in some areas, in my taste, but with incredibly impressive additions in other areas.  (Particularly in the theaters arts and music areas with new stages and performance halls, and also in athletic facilities on the landfill.)

To be clear, this body of water is not an inlet from Lake Michigan but a lagoon they built on campus a while back.  You can make out Lake Michigan right behind the trees.  But this lagoon plays a fun part in family history.  

Back when I was going to NU in the School of Speech (now Communications), I took a Communication Studies course, and for reasons I don't remember, one day the professor took the whole class down to the lagoon to practice projection.  (It wasn't a performance class, so I really don't recall at this point why we were doing this, perhaps to expand our awareness of the use of the voice or...oh, I don't know.)  But half the class stood on one side of the lagoon and the rest on the other shore.  And for decades after, my father who still be bemused by this and said, "So, just to be clear, I was paying tuition so that you could learn to yell across a lake..."  For what it's worth, I thought it was sort of silly at the time, too, though I enjoyed the rest of the class.  But that didn't matter.  It was always "That class where you yelled across the lake."

But hey, as long as we're down by the waterfront, I thought I might was well also include of my buddies who joined me for part of the walk.

Anyway, I bring up my walk for another reason entirely, for a reason that will likely mean absolutely nothing to most people, but it was a big deal to me.

Over the past few years, as I mentioned, I take this walk through the Northwestern campus.  And each time, there's one place I always make sure to stop at -- there is a museum on campus, and I always want to see it.  I don't mean I "always want to see it again", I mean quite literally...I always want to see it.  At least once.  But every single time I've been on campus, the Block Museum has been closed.  Either that was the one day it wasn't open, or they were closed for lunch, or they were closed for renovation, or they were closed to put in a new exhibition.  Whatever the reason, it's always been closed.  Always.  So, I've never seen it, and it looks very nice, and has a good reputation for a small museum on a college campus.  

But this year  ...are you ready? -- it was OPEN!!!  O joy!  I told the receptionist how thrilled I was to finally get in, and explained why.  She laughed and said, "Yes, we do seem to close a lot" -- but really, she was just being polite.  They don't close that often, just often enough when I'm there.

Alas, they only had one exhibit, but when I rolled my eyes at my timing again, she said, "Oh, no, it's a good one."  And it was.  "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time:  Art, Culture and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa."  It look at the Trans-Saharan trade culture from the days of antiquity, how the gold and even salt were such major factors in the area, and how historians and archaeologists have been able to put the past in perspective, often from only fragments. 

It wasn't a deeply-extensive exhibit, but respectably comprehensive, and very well presented, along with interesting video interviews of archaeologists talking about the area and this exhibit.  It will be traveling to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto this Fall -- and to any folks reading this in Washington, D.C. (and yes, this means you Nell Minow, who I know not only lives in the area, but even went to the beloved NU briefly, and we had a class together -- but she transferred to be with her longtime boyfriend who is now her longtime husband.  But I digress...), the exhibit will be there in the Spring of 2020 at the National Museum of African Art which a part of the Smithsonian Institution.

The exhibit got a lot of funding, but notably some came from the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.  Yes, it's that Buffet, but only in being the same family.  Not Warren Buffet, but his sister Rebecca Buffett Elliott who went to Northwestern and about two years ago gave the university a massive donation for that Global Studies institute.  And when I say "massive," that's not hyperbole.  It was $101 mlilion.  Mainly, I love the extra "$1 million" so that it wasn't just a flat, dull $100 million...

Anyway, I finally made it to the Block Museum on the Northwestern Campus.  All is well...

And huzzah again!  We have the other of the short videos from yesterday's rehearsal of the Grant Park Orchestra for their free concert today.  I'll have the post the other, wonderful but much longer video from the rehearsal when I return from Chicago, because the Internet connection is unfortunately much too slow to get it to upload properly.

The orchestra is largely made up of members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago orchestra, and the baritone is John Orduña, who (among his other credentials) has sung with the Lyric Opera, performing a very nice rendition of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America."  The conductor is Christopher Bell.  Keep in mind that this is a rehearsal, so I think they stop a few times, but I've used the Pause button well-enough I think so that it should flow pretty well.
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Bad news, good news.

The bad news is that I wasn't able to address the uploading issue, and so I probably won't be able to post the wonderful, but long video of the the Grant Park Orchestra playing its American-theme piece until after I get back from Chicago.  The good news is that I can post a shorter video -- and possibly another later!  O huzzah.

This is from the rehearsal yesterday when they played a song by my fave Leroy Anderson.  This is "Bugler's Holiday."  Keep in mind, again, that it's from a rehearsal, so I think there are some stops.  But thanks to the magic of the Pause button, I think it should go pretty well.

So, here is the continuation to the tale of Downtown Chicago in Millennium Park.

After I left that small jazz presentation by the youth band, I wandered back towards the Art Institute when I heard some more music, this coming from the main band shell.  And it turned out that the Grant Park Orchestra was rehearsing for the Fourth of July Concert there.

​The Grant Park Orchestra is no slapdash group.  Basically, it's the second major orchestra in the city, right behind the Chicago Symphony Orchestra -- but not very far behind.  It's largely made up of members of the Chicago Civic Orchestra that plays for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.  And during the summer, while the CSO puts on a full season of concerts at the Ravinia Music Festival, the Grant Park Orchestra has 2-3 free concerts a week at the band shell for a couple of months during the summer.

This is a couple of minutes of the rehearsal.  It's from a symphonic piece based on American themes.  And it was so wonderful -- not just this, but several other selections after -- that I eventually moved in closer to take a seat and stayed for an hour.  It was glorious.

This is a good "overture" from what's the come.  On the Fourth of July, I'll post more from those closer seats with more from the rehearsal and some great music for the holiday.  (Hopefully.  As I said, the Internet connection here on the road is incredibly slooooooooooooow.  And uploading video -- especially one wonderful selection that's nine minutes long! -- takes a long time.  This video below, only a couple minutes, took almost two hours to upload!)

But for now, this is a fine way to start...

So, today I planed to go downtown to the Chicago Art Institute.  And I did, and -- as always, it was wonderful.  They have a special exhibit on Manet -- who I like okay, but not my favorite of the Impressionists (although in fairness, he's not officially an Impressionist), but it was beautifully done.

However, I got there a bit early before the museum opened, so I wandered through the reasonably-new Millennium Park right next to it.  That's the place with the very recognizable (and wonderful) piece of outdoor art, The Bean.

But as I kept wandering, I heard some music and so headed over.  And there was a youth band playing there, a sort of citywide group for "after school" teens throughout the area.  And they were quite good.

Chicago actually has a long tradition of public art.  Best known are the outdoor Picasso, Chagall's Four Seasons, and works by Calder, Miro and others.  But the city also hires bands to often perform in plazas during lunch hour for business people having lunch.  And when the Goodman Theater wanted permission to expand, the city approved their plans with one proviso -- they had to put on several outdoor performances.

But wait!  There's more!  Another video that ratchets this all up several notches.

Unfortunately, the Internet connection here is REALLY SLOW.  So, rather than wait and post the other video here within this piece, I'm going to post what I have now, and then add a second article with the other video.  Hopefully I'll get to that tonight, but that's no sure thing since it's past midnight here.

But for now, we'll go with one at a time...