CAAF: Report from the 45th latitude

We returned last night from the Great Minneapolis Expedition. We made stops in Louisville, Chicago, Milwaukee and finally Minneapolis, and then motored through a long, fugue-like drive back to Asheville. 2,315 miles in seven days! It was my 37th birthday last week, and it was a present from Lowell to chauffeur me on a driving odyssey through the northern hinterlands near where I grew up, which was good of him. It’s not every man who is willing to spend a vacation staring down a cranberry bog. The trip was pretty perfect: We saw plays, we canoed, we played disc golf — and we saw lots of friends, old and new.*
As Terry reported, we met up with him, Mrs. Teachout and OGIC in Chicago to see Lion in Winter at the Writers’ Theatre, which I loved as much as Terry did. It was the same night as Game 6 of the Stanley Cup, so I got to meet OGIC in the full flush of her OGIC-ness — checking game scores at intermission, and then celebrating afterward at the Red Wings win. (My campaign to woo her to visit Asheville involves a map of North and South Carolina with pushpins where all the college and professional hockey teams are.) Afterward, we went to the only place open that late on a Wednesday in the suburbs, an old-school Chicago steakhouse, for chocolate mousse and coffee, and I got to razz Terry for a while for never having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and he got to razz me for never having seen Chinatown.
Lowell and I were lucky in the second play we saw too, a very funny, glittery production of Midsummer’s Night Dream at the Guthrie Theater. It was all satisfyingly over-the-top: Trapeze entrances, elaborate costumes, and big song-and-dance numbers for the fairy speeches (which do get a little adjectival so I understand the decision to put them to music even if some of the numbers got schmaltzy). It was my first time to the theater’s fab new building, and my first time seeing Shakespeare performed live. Which, as I told Terry and OGIC, seems strange as somehow I managed to see the Dirty Dancing tour but never a Shakespeare play before?
* If you’re a friend of mine from Wisconsin and I didn’t see you this trip, it’s because I’m hoping to see you on the next trip, in October or November, when we’ll hit Milwaukee again, maybe Madison, and Appleton.