I'm glad to be back to blogging after taking a little time off. I have just a few posts to get through before I reach my college experiences. Seriously, when I first started this blog almost a year ago, I thought it was going to take me about three months to reach adulthood. Boy, was I wrong. I never knew I had so much to write about from that period in my life.
So, I had a fairly active summer before I went to college. I spent more than two weeks on the road. I went back to the International Theatre Arts Conference at Ball State University and immediately after that, I went to Chicago for the DECA Conference.
There was nothing eventful about my second trip to Muncie in two years. The only difference was that I was able to get a date for the final night's production of "Grease," which featured a cast comprised of students from across the country, including someone from Albuquerque that I knew. I didn't get to go anywhere else with that date, which was kind of a blind set up by someone I was trying to date (but she already was going with someone else to the performance). I remember her name was Maz, that she was a cheerleader and a year younger than me. She had short blonde hair. I don't remember where she was from. We didn't talk very much. It was just awkward the whole time, BUT IT WAS AN ACTUAL DATE! YAHOO! I could honestly say that I had scored at least one real date four years in a row. In 1979, I took my first real girlfriend to Homecoming. In 1980, I dated someone who had me in the Friend Zone. In 1981, I had a prom date and this was the one for 1982. I would continue this one date a year streak until 1987, when I got my second real girlfriend and got to go out on more than one date with her.
The only other thing worth mentioning about Muncie is that I saw student productions of "The King and I" and "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," among other student productions. "King" was really good, but "Joseph" stunk. This was mostly because the cast just sang along with the album from 1974 (which I had a copy of) with NO ATTEMPT to phase out the lead vocals.
I left straight from Muncie to go to Chicago. I went to the local airport. There were two flights to Chicago, one in the morning and the other about 3 hours later. I was supposed to be on the later flight, but had arrived at the airport in time for the early one and they said I could go ahead and get on board. However, once we were in the air, I realized that I had left some personal possessions in the airport lobby. I had to wait to land in Chicago, contact the Muncie airport, have them put the possessions on the next flight and wait the three hours for the plane to arrive. It was like I shouldn't have even bothered getting on the early flight in the first place.
(A note about my flight: This was the first and last time I got to fly on a small aircraft, the kind that only has two columns of seats with one on each side of the plane. The advantage of this is that you get both a window and and aisle seat at the same time. However, I was not very secure in the airworthiness of the craft and we were flying at an altitude so low, I thought we were going to crash into the Sears Tower. Fortunately, the flight only lasted about an hour and 15 minutes.)
My Mom and the rest of the students from DECA had arrived in Chicago the day before. Mom had arranged for someone from the conference to meet me at the airport. Of course, she had told them to meet me at the later time, so I REALLY should have been on that second flight. But I don't know which would have been worse, waiting in Muncie or waiting in Chicago. The problem with waiting in Chicago was that I couldn't wait to just go outside and experience the Big City. In Muncie, I just would have had to wait for the next flight.
But that wait was still for naught, because the person who was supposed to meet me at the airport never arrived. I asked around and found out about a bus that would take me to the hotel where I was supposed to stay, the Conrad Hilton. I had to pay $5 to board the bus. I asked the bus driver if the bus went to the Conrad Hilton. He said it did. It was the last stop. It would take an hour and a half to get there. I had no idea that Chicago was so large, it would take a bus 90 minutes to drive to all the major Downtown hotels and drop people off. We were on the road for about an hour before the first stop. I was truly amazed at how spread out the city was.
While I was on the bus, I read a tourist guide of events that were taking place that month in Chicago. On the cover was a photo of Yul Brynnner in "The King and I." He was actually performing in Chicago at that time. I also saw that there was a tour of the current Broadway version of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." What a coincidence! (I would wind up seeing both of those productions while in Chicago, but this is all the detail I'm going into on this blog. I had a lot of other stuff happen to me there. I just have to mention this now because, as mentioned above, I had seen a decent high school production of "King" and a cruddy one of "Joseph" in Muncie. It was nice to see professionals doing these shows.)
We finally got to the hotel. I walked in the front door without any idea on how I was going to find my Mom. But that became less of a concern because she just happened to be in the lobby at the same time that I came in. I wasn't expecting that, but I was glad it turned out that way.
So, that's my path to Chicago in a nutshell. In the next post, I'll go more into detail about things that happened in Chicago while I was there.
No comments:
Post a Comment