entelein | Last night, with the bow ties

The ribs at my aunt and uncle's tavern are really quite good, but I hardly ever have them because I can usually snag a bone from my brother, or I am so enamored of the salmon, or the mixed greens and pasta that I don't even miss it. I had the half slab last night, and we sat out in the main portion of the tavern: my mom, my brother, and Svetlana. They were as good as I remembered, of course. I gave Ty a card for his birthday, which was Tuesday, and each year he seems just a little closer to me in age even though he's still the same 2 years and 9 months younger he's always been.

We went upstairs to see my aunt, who has finally settled in my cousin's apartment after having been in the hospital since before the New Year. She's got a hospital bed set up in the living room, and after a few minutes you don't even notice the oxygen tanks and the railings on the bed, the controls to move the bed into various positions ... you notice my aunt's eyes, which seem so much more alive and expressive than oh, a month ago, when she was in the hospital, and the case workers kept making noises like "nursing home," and "assisted care," and were essentially scaring the crap out of her and making her feel isolated and unmotivated to do anything about her eating habits or her atrophied muscles.

Her tiny frame was curled fairly tightly as I stood nearby, her feet swollen and flashing with pain that caused her to gasp and squinch her eyes shut for seconds at a time. I held her hand, and I told her it could only get better from here, that the physical therapy must hurt so badly, but that she looked so much better. I even joked that she would be able to move well enough to see me in Into the Woods come June, even though she and her family have never really been able to come to any of my performances over the years. Six day workweeks running your own business means very little true free time. They work so hard.

My cousin clucked her tongue and said, "You must hate us for never making it to your shows!" I laughed and shook my head. I was just glad to be standing in a Wicker Park/Bucktown living room, holding my aunt's very real and warm hand, television blaring in the background, new surveillance camera keeping an eye on her as her husband and daughter work in the kitchen right below.

We went back downstairs after a bit, and my mom taught us (again) how to make bow ties out of dollar bills, and then my brother and Svetlana managed to replicate this spoon/fork/toothpick/glass balancing trick my uncle trotted out on a casino boat years and years ago. He was about sixteen sheets to the wind at the time, but still managed to wedge the flatware together, get the toothpick wedged between two tines on the fork, and then balanced that narrow piece of wood on the edge of the glass. As we finished that part of the trick in the tavern last night, we grabbed a lighter out of my mom's purse and lit the inside-the-glass portion of the toothpick. It burned until it got to the glass, and then snuffed itself out.

What was left was a bizarre and hard to believe visual: a fork and spoon locked together, hooked on a half toothpick whose end rested only on the edge of the glass. We really should've taken a picture. My other cousin immediately went off to find more toothpicks, so he could impress the chicks at the bar, I guess.

A great amount of rain has fallen in Chicago tonight. It took me several tries to get under the viaducts on my way home from rehearsal tonight. I had to turn around from two of them before I found one that had less than a foot of standing water at its lowest point. The gutters and sewers were apparently not up to the storming from this evening. The air is so humid and heavy with water. We are under water and breathing slowly, here. Fortunately my apartment has kept a lot of its coolness and dryness from a few days ago, so sleeping tonight shouldn't be too awful.