Candy

For the first three days of our visit, in a bid to win our favor, Chicago gave us candy.

You think I'm joking?

Day one, at the Chicago Art Institute:

Yes, that's a big pile of candy.

You can't quite read that, I'm sure, but it explains about the candy, which is part of a work of art by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. His partner died of an AIDS-related illness, but before he got sick, he weighed 175 pounds--the same weight as the candy in the installation. Viewers are invited to take candy, an act that represents, among other things, a kind of wasting away.

So I took a purple-wrapped candy.

Day Two, at the Museum of Science and Industry:

I participated in an experiment being conducted by two university students. A stranger (male, middle-aged, British, also plucked from the museum's visitors) sat next to me, took a pen, and closed his eyes. I verbally guided him through a maze on paper. We were timed. We got candy at the end. I chose the candy I thought Dave might want.

Day Three, at a production called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind by a theater group called The Neo-Futurists:



One of the thirty plays the performed in sixty minutes was about Monsanto bid to take over the world. At the end, they handed out candy.


Despite the offered sweetness, I have to admit that Chicago is not my town. I agree with the critic who called it a city second to New York. Why? Because it's one of the most segregated big cities that I've ever been in. I mean, similar to Jackson, Mississippi, and Los Angeles, California, in Chicago, the white people are on one side of the counter, the brown/black people on the other side. Guess who's being served. Guess who's doing the serving. Whereas in New York City--in Manhattan anyway--you can step out the front door and get into a cab driven by an Ethiopian who just dropped off a Chinese woman for her balalaika lesson with a Ukrainian music teacher. That's my kind of city. I want to throw my travel cash around that city, not in the Jackson, Mississippi of the north.