The faces of the week: “real America”
Down the street from the Silk Road offices, crews are still taking down the tents in Grant Park.
Regardless of who you voted for on Tuesday, you were part of an historic moment. Not only did we vote in record numbers, we turned out to share the results in record numbers. How can I help but share some photos of downtown Chicago?
None of the photos can do justice, though, to our cross-cultural blog topic. Yet they give some idea of what it feels like to be in a large crowd of people thinking, is this a United Colors of Benetton ad? No, it’s just Chicago. Integrated.
I lost track of the combinations of age and color and gender and style around me walking the streets that night. At some point, it stopped mattering. But I did overhear a woman in a herringbone coat yelling excitedly into her iPhone, “And there were two lesbians standing in front of me, and in front of them, two Muslims!”
When I told my father how exciting and overwhelming it was to be in city in love with its moment, he told me about another moment that he will now think of as linked to this week: he was in the U.S. Senate observers’ gallery in 1957 at roughly 3am when Strom Thurmond sat down after his 24-hour-and-18-minute filibuster. As soon as he sat down, they voted to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
And I think, oh right, that takes us right back to the idea of why we do theatre. Because it’s one thing to look at the big picture, but somehow even more satisfying to hear the individual stories of how humans intersect with each other in time.
Got a story of the week, or of the past to share?