Alaska Roadtrip Day 7-8: Chicago to Minneapolis, MN

After Emily’s delicious breakfast of French bread French toast, we headed into downtown Woodstock, IL, to check out the town square. Groundhog Day had been filmed in town, and Emily told us that one of the restaurants was decorated with pictures of Bill Murray. The old courthouse had also been converted into pub, and the jail cells had become booths. Madison decided to spend the day with Emily in Woodstock, but I took a commuter train to Chicago to meet a college friend named Sara Hostalet.

The train was a double-decker affair with big windows. I watched the corn fields and rural town squares roll by until they gave way to modern shopping centers, followed by a wasteland of empty factories, the same decrepit halo of war-era industry that seems to surround every older American city. But Chicago itself was a fascinating blend of modern and classic architecture.

I met Sara at her apartment, half a dozen stops up the Red Line from downtown. She had a big flat above a Mexican restaurant, whose owners were happy to serve as her grocery store- she bought produce, cheeses, and even bags of ice for fifty cents each. As un- or underemployed poster-children of the recession, I always love to hear a success story, and Sara had one: she’s the manager of a gay strip club, draws a salary, and even receives health benefits! We went to the beach with her friends Liz, Shea, and Eric, but not before stopping at Weiner Circle for a hot dog.

Weiner Circle holds a special place in annals of my college fraternity’s history. There’s a humungous woman who works there, and sometimes she allows you to buy a ‘chocolate shake,’ whereupon she takes off her shirt and wiggles her tremendous bulk in your direction. “THERE’S YOUR CHOCOLATE SHAKE,” she apparently yells, followed by a string of obscenities. Several brothers from the Chicago area once brought a video camera to the Weiner Circle and asked her to plug the fraternity on film. She responded affirmatively (though not without the requisite profanity) and the video was widely circulated among AEPi chapters- so much so that she was flown in as the keynote speaker at the national convention. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

After a relaxing afternoon at the beach we went back to Sara’s house for deep dish pizza. It was phenomenal. The crust was as thick as a baseball bat, and easily sustained the generous heaps of sausage, spinach, and cheese that crunched and oozed into my mouth. She took us to a bar called FKA, which stands for Formerly Known As. It had been a transvestite bar in its previous incarnation, and we did see one transvestite. S/he was very tall and looked like a blond Professor Snape. Jeanette met us at FKA before we went to Berlin, a club around the corner from Sara’s workplace. Berlin served a drink called the “Berlin Bomb,” a devastating mixture of strawberry rum and energy drink designed to be quaffed in a single mighty draught. I sampled one. Then I invented some killer dance moves. Hey, it’s cultural research.

The next morning I ate breakfast with a high school friend named Emily (not to be confused with Madison’s girlfriend Emily) and took the train back to Woodstock, where we said goodbye to the Madison’s Emily and her mom. Our next stop was Tracy’s house in Minneapolis. When I last saw Tracy in Atlanta, she told me how much she hated cut-off jean shorts. I decided I’d dress to impress by cutting off an old pair of super-tight girl’s jeans, but erred in my snippage and ended up showing way too much thigh. Tracy cringed at their sheer awesomeness. We walked around a local art fair in her hometown of Edina, MN (Pronounced ed-INE-a. Rhymes with… nevermind) and went to Matt’s Bar to eat a Jucy Lucy.

The Jucy Lucy is a cheeseburger, but the cheese is on the inside. Madison had primed me for this strange and delicious nugget of culinary ingenuity. The restaurant’s Jucy Lucy had won ‘Food Wars’ on the Food Network earlier this year. Our waitress indeed warned us that molten cheese would blast out into your mouth on the first bite, and part of me hoped that it would run down my chest in a most cavemanly fashion. It was so good that Tracy, an ardent vegetarian, even took a little bite.

After dinner we scooped up a girl named Meggie on our way to Tracy’s stomping ground, an uptown bar neighborhood that felt a lot like 6^th street in Austin. Meggie did little to shake my stereotypical image of Midwesterners as uniformly tall and attractive blondes. She and Tracy turned out to be the rule, rather than the exception: every bar we visited was packed with strikingly beautiful women. Each bar and club stamped your wrist at the door, and one of my stamps had a picture of Sylvester Stallone’s Judge Dredd saying “Don’t drink and drive.” We stayed out until court was adjourned.

I’m impressed with the Midwest. Everyone is polite, and very quick to laugh. Tracy shared a Garrison Keillor quote, “The women are smart, the men are beautiful, and all the children are above average.”