Taste: Time to Fess Up

[acmespaceship]

In which your heroine and e_m_b  admit to dietary transgressions on Monday night at Taste of Chicago and happen to stumble across the birth spasms of dreadful American Musical Theater.   Pierogi!  Liquid Nitrogen!  Ronnie Woo-Woo!  What do Dennis DeYoung and Pongo the Dalmatian have in common?  (answer: a desperate need for a lyricist)  Here is the full confession (eat your heart out, Chicago expats):

Pad Thai from Star of Siam
Sausage Pizza from Lou Malnati's
Mustard Fried Catfish from B. J.'s Market
Potato and Cheese Pierogi with sour cream from Kasia's Deli
Pork Filled Banana Dumpling from Sabor Latino
Bhel (puffed rice with curry) from Arya Bhavan
Caramel Popcorn on a stick, frozen in liquid nitrogen, from Garrett's
Chocolate Gelato from Canady Le Chocolatier
Jambalaya from Blue Bayou
Mango-Cumin Dusted Fries from Vermillion (India-Latin fusion)
Sweet Potato Pie from Soul Vegetarian East

Note:  Popcorn is not a good insulator, so the Garrett's concoction looks awesome coming out of the cooler (steaming like a space shuttle fuel tank) but quickly becomes a ball of slightly cool caramel corn, so not really worth the tickets.  I will say it's better than stopping at the Garrett's store on Jackson on the way home, where the people in line said there was a 45 minute wait.

Saw Ronnie Woo-Woo shilling the cheezborgers at Billy Goat's.  If you're not a Cub fan, sorry, there's really no way to explain who Ronnie Woo-Woo is.

Did not see David Axelrod at Manny's but you know he's there in spirit.

Large area set aside for sports (volleyball, badminton...) with the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid branding.  This is going to be a long summer. 

While eating our gelato and jambalaya (you know it's complete nutrition if you're eating foods that start with the same phoneme) we wandered to the Broadway in Chicago bandshell show, where Mary Poppins was just finishing up and then comes ... Dennis DeYoung, erstwhile frontman for Styx.  He introduces his new project, writing music and lyrics for the Disney stage version of 101 Dalmations.  Now this announcement is already like having an acid trip, when on comes a young actor to sing some of the songs.  Which sound oddly like Styx ballads accompanied by a rehearsal pianist.  The lyrics for the big uptempo number were something like...

One hundred and one dalmatians!
One hundred and one dalmatians!
One hundred and one dalmatians!
One hundred and one dalmatians!

OK, so they're still in workshops.  But really.  Except for Cruella, is there any character in 101 Dalmatians that you've been wanting to hear sing?  When do we get the Broadway version of Herbie the Love Bug?  (Dancing Volkswagons!)

All in all, a typical summer afternoon in our beautiful and very deeply surreal city.  Did you go to Taste?  Confess. 

Comments

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

(eat your heart out, Chicago expats):

Munch, munch, munch...at least we get to go to Windycon!

[gmcdavid.livejournal.com]

I could feel my arteries hardening just reading it :-)>

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, but I would have LOVED to go....

[scarfman]

Dammit. I couldn't find a Garrett's last time I was there. Or didn't have time to look.

[qtrhorserider.livejournal.com]

I think we didn't have time because it was the kind of comfort food i really needed that week.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

So Disney musicals are produced by Bialystock & Bloom?

[acmespaceship.livejournal.com]

Oh Pongo, you dirty pig! Pull over.

[qtrhorserider.livejournal.com]

Well cross your fingers for me, or pray, or sacrifice a chocolate bar to the great god Ghu or whatever it takes so that I can pass the f**king bar exam this time. Then maybe I can have a job, and cash and can come and spend another week, only this time feasting. Sounds much better than the insanity of running interferance between my offspring during the wedding.

I'm so sick of doing multiple choice questions I could cry...

[e-m-b.livejournal.com]

To elaborate a little further: The singer who was brought out to perform Pongo (we couldn't see the stage, but I doubt there were costumes) sounded almost exactly like Dennis DeYoung, thirty-some years ago. On top of that, the tunes could have been leftovers from an old Styx recording session that were never used. It was like a comedy sketch in which a Styx cover band has been brought in to write a Disney musical. The sad part: No matter how bad it is, the show will probably do just fine, because parents seem endlessly willing to take kids to Disney-based live shows, and the Dalmatian franchise seems to have a lot of legs (404, to be precise). "But somehow we missed out on the pot of gold--" DeYoung probably won't miss out on it this time.