favorite Chicago stories

Here are some of my fave Chicago moments:

On Wednesday we had a fun staff party, where we did a "How to Host a Murder"-type event. It was pirate-themed, called "Murder Among the Mateys". As an international staff, we sometimes encounter fabulous challenges with language, and it turns out, pirate jargon is no exception. I spent the busride to the party explaining to Yui from Japan and Manuel from Mexico the following terms: buccaneer, commodore, privateer, gurgling, and wench.

Picture Sofie from Sweden: she is standing on the street corner downtown Chicago in a flowy jagged hemmed skirt, a large green parka, hightop tennis shoes, striped socks, and long curly hair. She is counting her change, trying to figure out if she has enough cash to buy a coffee before the bus leaves. A homeless man approaches her and hands her a dollar bill. He says to her, "Here you go, honey. I know how it is. I've been there." She was so shocked she didn't know what to do beyond saying thank you and keeping the dollar!

the whirlwindy city

we were in blustery, snowy Chicago for a very fast week. Three days of classroom programming in inner city high schools was an intense experience for the cast... lots of metal detectors, showing ID at the door, and very positive responses from the majority of students we interacted with.

Our sponsor was the National PTA, so our school projects were under the microscope for potential future projects. I hope they were pleased, as I was very proud of how much the cast is improving in their facilitation of activities, and the creativity at which they approach ways to personalize the games to their countries and personal style. The week was also a test drive of an activity & leave-behind puzzle that I designed with the help of one of our students, Ultan from Ireland, who is a talented graphic designer. We used to hand cut world puzzles out of posterboard for every classroom we went into, and I am so excited about the higher quality and less labor that this new version allows.

We had decent turnout for the show in a city that is really challenging to promote in, because of the vast amount of entertainment any given night of the week. The Copernicus theatre was a funky old movie house in the Polish part of town-- it doubled as a Polish community center. UWP Chicago alumni sponsored our meals on show day, and they did a polish theme for lunch, complete with sausage and delicious perogies from a local restaurant. The only downside of the show was the backstage: there wasn't one!
It really changed the shape of the show, as everyone had to enter the stage from the sides, and to get around behind the stage you had to run outside in the parking lot, where it was of course about 15 degrees, windy and snowing. I'm pretty sure everyone has a cold now.

Even though casts love the idea of big cities like Chicago, in reality, it makes for an extra grueling schedule, because we are hosted all over the metro. That means that most people got up before 6am every day, took the L in to Union Station, then took our shuttle buses for another 45 minutes to wherever we were meeting first thing. Reverse that to go home, and most people got back between 7:30-8:00pm. Do that for 6 days in a row, and we're all ready to go back to the small town where our meeting point is five minutes from our host family's house!

BUT big cities also offer a lot of cool opportunities. We partnered with the National PTA to help them with an event they hosted at the Field Museum. They held a Parent Summit, and parents could bring their kids, and then while they were in the parenting classes, we took their kids around the Field Museum. A great way for us to get to see a cool museum from a kid's perspective... and we got in free! The only hard part was it was after our show day, so we finished taking down the set at midnight, and were at the museum at 8am. The cast had the afternoon free for sightseeing, and I went home and took a nap.

Scottie and I were lucky to be in the staff hotel this week-- right downtown at the Sheraton near Navy Pier. We went to dinner at Heaven on Seven, a Cajun restaurant, with Michael & Alyssa Burgart. It was so fun to catch up with them for an evening!
Our hotel team tried out Ed Debevicks - always a good time, and Al's Italian Beef Sandwiches, which were delicious.

And I was so excited to have Kato and Bethie come visit for the weekend! Katie took a bus from Minneapolis and made it in time for the 2nd half of the show friday night. Bethie, who had seen the show earlier in our tour, made it in late Friday- taking an evening flight. They joined us at the museum and helped out a group of kids... their team was the Bodacious Bugs. We visited Millenium park, had a drink at the Signature lounge on the 96th floor of the Hancock Center, and on Sunday B & K won the Wicked rush lottery and went to the matinee. To end our week we drove out to Wheaton to have a fantastic homecooked dinner at Howie & Dorothy's house. I was so glad that it worked out to see them too.

A quick, crazy city, and then we're off, back across I-80, and then turning south to drive into spring!

Chocolate City, USA

We've been in Burlington, WI, since Wednesday. Burlington is known as chocolate city because of the big Nestle factory that is here. When the wind blowing, the whole town smells like chocolate. Unfortunately, they don't have tours, otherwise we would definitely have gone. Instead, we focused on other local Wisconsin flair, by visiting two dairy farms and having brats for lunch.

Burlington is a really charming town, very friendly with lots of lakes... my host family keeps lamenting that we're not here in the summer so we could go waterskiing. We worked with an incredible non-profit organization called Love Incorporated, which is a thrift store, transition living center, food pantry, food kitchen and many other community services all rolled into one. My favorite part is that they will use everything you drop off. Items that they can't sell in the thrift store gets baled and sold to developing countries for $150.00 per bale of clothing.

Burlington's sold out show in the high school gymnasium contained our sound technician Andrew's worst nightmare-- during the song right before intermission all the sound went out... band, microphones, everything. The cast finished the song "Keep the Beat" acapella, with the audience keeping the beat! They pulled it off so well that some audience members thought it was supposed to happen that way. Many of the students commented in our cast meeting yesterday that that moment was one of their very favorites in up with people so far... knowing that even when something goes horribly wrong, they can pull through.

Go Muskies!

Our three quick days in Muscatine focused around the Muscatine schools (Go Muskies!)--- our beneficiary was the Muscatine Community School Foundation, and we led our Stand for Peace classes in 48 classrooms in one day, plus visited another 15 classrooms at the high school. Our show in the high school auditorium was sold out, and we had people waiting to see if they could get late seating.

Muscatine was especially fun for me, because Lorene Lewison, my high school show choir director who originally connected me to Up with People, lives there and it was so neat to see her and her family.

We also met with a really fascinating organization called the "Stanley Foundation", which is based in Muscatine. They started as an organization that funded informal interaction between international leaders that served at the United Nations. It brings a whole new meaning to "those who play together stay together." They would host retreats, tennis tournaments, other events in the 1950s for UN delegates so they could interact in a more relaxed environment. Now they have expanded and morphed into a foreign policy think tank. They have a number of programs, including producing international segments for NPR, and they produce videos and discussion questions on international issues that church groups, community leaders, college campuses, etc., can receive from them free of charge to host a current events discussion. They led for us a discussion on peacekeeping missions (like well-digging in Djibouti) by the US military, and if that is an appropriate task for them, and if not, what other organization should be doing it. Check them out at www.stanleyfoundation.org

Des Moines

February 25, 2008: Our first week-long city was over in the blink of an eye. It was such fun to stay with Kate and Andy Menschner, who just recently moved to Des Moines with their friendly bulldog, Penny Lane. (Katie is Ellen’s good friend from high school).

Our travel to Des Moines was treacherous – we saw literally hundreds of vehicles in the ditch of I-80, which was designated a no-tow zone because of the inches thick glazing of ice on the road. We also hit an extremely cold snap, where the highs were just around zero with bitter winds. We changed a cast ice-skating event at the last minute to an indoor rollerskating party instead, as the weather was too miserable to have people skate outdoors for 2 hours.

We were sponsored by Holmes Honda, the owner of which created a foundation called Kids Against Hunger of Des Moines. We worked alongside community volunteers all day on Tuesday packing meals. The cast scooped rice, soy, dried vegetables, and a vitamin packed bouillon tablet into a 400g plastic bag, then sealed them and packed them in boxes to be shipped to underdeveloped countries in turmoil, like Haiti and Zimbabue. Our goal was to pack 200,000 meals in one day. Success! We ended up packaging 251,640 meals, and a small group of students also did short UWP performances eight times throughout the day. It was fun to have Emily come and volunteer with us in the afternoon.

We performed the UWP Show for over 1,000 people at the Des Moines Civic Center. Thank you to the volleyball friends group for making the trek to see the performance. Scott was in the audience and said it was this cast’s strongest show yet on the road.

We also had our first significant regional learning day… we toured Pioneer Labs, which is a Du Pont company that engineers seeds. Some are genetically modified, others are cross-bred for higher yield or to effectively deter pests. It was fascinating to talk to their scientists, including Dwight, who holds the patent on the first gene particle gun, developed in the 1980s to literally shoot genes into a plant seed cell to experiment in plant genetic modification. This topic is fairly controversial, with strong differing opinions in various parts of the world, and the representatives of the company did a fantastic job of answering our tough questions.

Their take on genetic modification is this: The population of our earth is growing rapidly. To feed that population, either we can grow more food on the land we currently use, or we need to use more land to grow more food. Other modifications beides higher yield also can include putting small amounts of toxins in the seed that will kill root-eating or plant-infesting bugs when they eat the plant, but is much less chemical than using pesticides to spray the plants once they are grown. Farmers that use these modifications also need to plant a certain percentage of their fields without this chemical, so the bugs aren’t completely eliminated from that region. We visited labs full of petri dishes and test tubes of baby corn stalks, and the whole experience was fascinating.

We also heard from the president of the World Food Prize, which was created by a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to acknowledge significant achievements in agriculture in relation to human food supply.

Maquoketa (pronounced Macoconut)

Feb 18, 2008: Maquoketa, IA is a town of 6,000 people that is about 40 miles north of the Quad Cities Area. The town had an enormous fire a few weeks ago that destroyed six buildings on their historic main street. Part of our service was raising money for the strained fire department.

We also experienced our first serious winter storm, lots of freezing rain that turned to snow on our show day. We were afraid that we would have less people in our audience than we had onstage! But luckily, we had some dedicated host families and community members, and we still had over 300 people on a blizzardy Sunday afternoon. I was especially appreciative of my sisters Beth and Emily that made long drives from Minneapolis and Des Moines to come see the show. It was the first performance I participated in with this cast, and I had such a fun time onstage. Beth took some fabulous pics of the show with her zoom lens, and shared them with me, so I can share them with you!

Scott and I were hosted in Davenport, 40 miles south of Maquoketa, with Beth’s good friend from college, Elizabeth and her husband Tim. On our host family day they took us to Credit Island, which is a winter nesting site for bald eagles. We saw at least 15 eagles in the trees and soaring above the river, which I thought was spectacular. Apparently that’s not even average—that at certain times of day you can see more in the range of 50-70 eagles in that area.

Funny Lincoln Memories

February 12th, 2008: My roommate Sofie is from Sweden, and last night on our walk around the block with our host dad Bill and his black lab, Poudre, (pronounced: poo-durr… its Dutch), Sofie had to stop and take a photo of a fire hydrant. She thought it was so cool, as they don’t have them in Sweden.

My roommate Jessica is from Tucson, AZ, and has never spent any significant amount of time in cold weather. When we stopped just inside the front door to take off our coats, hats, mittens, and unbundle ourselves, she commented that it was just like when its cold in the movies! Cold for her is 50 degrees, so Nebraska in February has been quite an experience.

Today was our first day of doing our curriculum in schools called “Stand for Peace”, and I ate lunch next to a first grader named Eleanor. She was at a table alone, seemed very comfortable and talkative with grown-ups but not really included by her peers. We were having a nice chat; she told me how we had the same hair, and about her favorite TV show called Cyber- something, and how I can read more about it on PBSkids.org, and out of the blue she says, “Will I ever see you again?” Just so matter of fact, and I am shocked to realize that the answer is very likely no. It really touched my heart, that here I was sitting with this little girl, and she could read that I was just passing through her life. I told her that I didn’t think so, as I was off to another school in the afternoon and leaving for Iowa on Thursday. She’d never been to Iowa, but did have cousins in Kearney (which I had driven through yesterday). She showed me how where to dump my trash, and bring my lunch tray and silverware, and as she walked away, she said in a very wise and charming little voice, “Well, its been nice chatting with you.”

Eleanor from Rousseau Elementary school is a very classy little lady, and I hope when I grow up, I can be a bit like her.