Let’s Dance

Diana and I, in our past lives, used to be pretty darn hip. I, of the heavily drinking, ironic t-shirt wearing advertising set. And Diana, of the stinky VW, Phish following set. Occasionally, the whole un-hipness of being an Evanston-living, Subaru-driving, Golden-Doodle owning parent comes crashing down on us and we need to get back in touch with the cool kids.

Today, we decided to venture into the city of Chicago to attend a local street fair. I don’t think I need to remind everyone of my stance on street fairs. After putting on Elijah’s baby flack jacket and encasing him in 3 inches of protective plastic, we drove 12 minutes to Roger’s Park.

It was like every other suburban street fair we’ve attended this summer with a few differences. Instead of tepid Budweiser on tap, they offer tepid, so-bad-it’s-considered-hip Old Style. And instead of everyone being dressed in identical cargo shorts and flip flops, everyone was wearing skinny jeans and flip flops. But there was the same old artsy crap that I love.

They did have an excellent band playing at the end of the block with some tables and chairs. So I found some non-ironic beers and we sat down to let Grover get some shade.

The band was a great salsa-y kind of group and a couple extra hip people were dancing. Eli became entranced by this huge dude who had great rhythm. And sure enough, Eli wandered over to him and began to dance his hilarious dance. Which is basically walking and shaking his arms.

Every time the band stopped, the crowd would clap and Eli would think it was for him. Well, at least two people were clapping for him. By the third song Eli got bored and walked to the foot of the stage and began pounding it like the world’s most adorable Danzig fan (thanks Fussy Ninja blog).

He was fine until he realized you could crawl under the stage. Rather than lose him forever among the wires and cables, we snatched him up and returned home to the comfort of our suburban safety net.*

The last two posts have been very cool-centric. It won’t happen again.

*The last three murders in Evanston have been within a three block radius of our house. Take that, Chicago!