After breakfast, we took the bus to the Museum of Science and Industry.
Our primary goal in visiting the museum was to see "Animal Inside Out," a traveling exhibit similar to Body Works which focuses on human anatomy. This one, of course, focused on animals (with a few humans thrown in to offer comparisons). There were no photographs allowed inside the exhibit, but I will say that it was strange and interesting (even after having to do loads of dissections and observations in pursuit of a biology degree) to see the range of animal anatomy. There were ostriches and oxen and lots of reindeer for some reason. There were giraffes and dogs and pigs and sheep and horses. There were rabbits and cats and squid and sharks. There were camels and goats. Lots of things. It was strange and weird and interesting.
After the exhibit, we walked around the rest of the museum. I was tagged by some psych students to do the experiment I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the one where I was paired up with the Brit and got some candy after. We had a caffeine break in the museum coffee shop (iced coffee for me, juice for Dave) then toured around a bit more.
We tried a "relaxation" competition game in which you have to "out-relax" your opponent. (Dave won that, obviously.) We also sat in a storytelling booth and interviewed each other for an exhibit called "Talk to Me."
The museum's exhibits are mostly designed to appeal to kids--and they were there in abundance with their largely inattentive parents--but I will say that I thought the building was gorgeous. The original was built in the late 1800's, but the inside is pure 21st century.
Leaving the museum, we came back to The Loop by bus to have hot dogs for lunch. As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing not to love about a Chicago-style hot dog. In addition to our hot dogs, we also shared a "hot, wet" Italian beef sandwich, which: Meh.
I had told Dave about a cheese shop (Pastoral Artisan Cheese, Bread & Wine) that I had seen online and, looking on his phone, he realized that it was only a couple of blocks from us. Of course we had to walk down and pick up some cheese, bread, and wine (which we had later for dinner). Cute little shop.
Our day wasn't even close to being over though. We still had some experimental theater to see. Another long bus ride to some part of Chicago called Andersonville left us around the corner from the theater.
I found this little production online, at AskMetafilter, where several people proclaimed it the best part of their visit to Chicago. (I wouldn't go that far, but it was pretty good.)
Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is an ongoing production in which a handful of performers perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. And don't think they cheat you; they give you a menu of the thirty plays and there's a timer that counts down the sixty minutes.
But first things first: You can buy tickets online or at the door, but in either case you get "rolled in." That is, there is a $9 base price that everybody pays--but you also roll a die to determine your final ticket price. The cheapest ticket is $10 (you rolled a 1), the most expensive is $15 (you rolled a 6). If you, like we did, buy a ticket online, it's $20 and they refund the amount on the die you roll. (Or you can, like we did, not roll the dice and just donate the "extra" you don't get refunded to the theater to help them out a bit.)
And it didn't happen on the night we were there, but if the production sells out, they call the pizza place around the corner and order in pizza for the whole theater--pizza being the only reason they ever stop the clock.
As each person is rolled in, you get a name tag. Dave told the woman writing his out that his name was Wilbur. She wrote this on his tag:
I told her my name was Andrea and she wrote this:
Each of the audience members got one. My favorite tag ("Odious") was attached to a tall, model-esque blond woman.
There were rules to the show. The plays are numbered one through thirty and those numbers are clothespinned up to a line that hangs above the stage area. At the end of each two-minute-ish play, a performer would yell "Curtain!" and audience members would shout out a number between one and thirty. The first to be heard determined the next play. A performer would jump up and grab the number off the line, the stage would get set up with with whatever props they needed, a performer would read the title and yell, "Go!" Then, as they say, "After the word go, a play happens."
It was a bit insane. But they did it. Thirty plays in sixty minutes. (Apparently, they don't always do it. But they always stop at the end of sixty minutes.)
At the end, Dave bought a t-shirt as his sole Chicago souvenir and we walked back out into the neighborhood to catch the bus back to our temp digs.
We had cheese and bread and wine for dinner, as I said.
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