ravinia

a word to the wise. it's just not worth going to sold out ravinia shows. even if it is robert plant and allison krauss. maybe it was the ravinia performance of the decade, but what difference does that make to you if you're sitting so far back on the lawn that you're nowhere near any of the speakers and you can't hear anything?
don't get me wrong, there's always something to be said for good food and good company... and it helps if your good blogmate brings out from reserve two bottles of last year's homemade white wine. and if she also brings an assortment of yummy cheeses. and if there is the promise that next time there will be home s'mores maker (read: tabletop fire).
but you'll still have to be one of the morons with a folding chair sardined into the metra train, inhale the clouds of desperate tobacco smoke emitted by hundreds of post-sardined, stressed out zeppelin fans, witness really awkward middle-aged festival freak-outs ("i just can't handle all these folding chairs touching me!"), get through the will-call bottle neck, and fight your way home through the one open lane of the inbound Edens.
not that i didn't have a lovely time... but can someone find me a less popular band next time?

addendum:

things i learned at the robert plant show: if you think you're alone in not actually being a zeppelin fan so much as you remember chasing a boy who loved zeppelin when you were in high school, you're wrong. apparently we all went through that.

and

things i learned after the robert plant show: even if your boyfriend was one of those boys in high school, and has more zeppelin knowledge than anyone else around the picnic blanket, don't assume that his assumptions are correct just because they sound plausible. so it's a nice story that robert plant used to sing the high part of "battle of evermore " but handed it off to allison krauss in his scratchy-voiced old age, but that's not actually what happened. robert plant never sang the high part.