On a rainy Thursday under a park district shelter, a group of about 12 people and one puppy gathered to talk bees.

It was a free park district outreach program with the Chicago Honey Co-op, which manages urban beehives throughout the city, selling raw honey at farmers markets.

Operations Manager Sydney Barton took the onlookers and puppy through the process of creating and managing your own urban hive.

Here’s some, but not nearly all, of what she said.

Stung

Move slow. Move smooth. A few long-sleeved white shirts from a thrift shop are better than a bulky, hot bee suit. Garden gloves are better than the professional gauntlets for sale. A veil is, however, mandatory. Bees can get in the eyes.

“They really don’t pay attention to you unless you make them notice you,” Barton said.

But that’s far from the only incorrect assumption about bees, she said.

The term “pure honey” on the side of a squeeze bear is meaningless. If it’s been blended or mixed with anything, you can’t even call it honey. “Organic” is probably imported, as the U.S. currently has no organic standard for honey. Also, it’s unlikely, unless you can make the bees promise only to go to organic-certified plants.

It’s not necessary to smoke the hive every time you approach. That depends on what the bees are doing and how much they have to defend. When you set up a new hive, no smoke needed.

“My teacher won’t stop laughing about that,” a little girl chimed in at the phrase “smoke the hive.”

The swarm

Despite the scary name of “swarm,” massive clusters of bees taking over trees, dead logs and the occasional downtown bicycle are refugees from overcrowded hives shopping around for a new place to build. They’re not invested enough in their new home to sting you to (their) death for it.

The hive itself, that stackable wooden box of removable frames, is stackable just so you can add new boxes and give the colony room to grow so you don’t end up with half your bees on DNAinfo.

For the urban beekeeper, the path to honey starts in January, when you order equipment and three pounds of bees and a queen from a breeder. You spend your winter and early spring assembling and painting your hive, waiting for the package to arrive.

The beautiful hive that you designed yourself to genuflect to the built environment while giving a covert nod to the works of Rem Koolhaas won’t get you where you want to go. Since the 1850s, the Langstroth beehive has been a big ol’ box of frames for one simple reason — to get inside a bee’s head and trick it into making more honey than the hive needs.

Around tax time, you get your bees in the mail. Introduce them to your hive (there’s a whole procedure for that, but I’m already pushing the boundary of interesting trivia vs. “Ugh, Paul’s into a thing again.”)

So you get them in the new home and they start bee-ing the place up,

Romance

After everyone’s nestled in, worker bees escort the slim-enough-to-fly virgin queen to a drone congregation area, a spot 10-40 meters (30-130 feet) in the air where the male drones have gathered. The drones mate with her en masse, breaking off their sperm organ into the queen and dying in the process.

“The queen, when she goes out for those mating flights, never has to go out again. She’s good for the rest of her life,” Barton said.

One flight comes to 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a day from April to November for the two to five years a queen bee lives.

The drone congregation areas are static, the exact same spot in the air used year after year. But every fall, the hive kicks out the useless males to die in the cold in order to stretch out the valuable winter larder for the workers and queen.

Every spring a new crop of drones finds the exact same plot of air their long-dead forebears did, and no one knows how.

Bee economics

Beekeeping has become crowded market. The supply has learned to squeeze that demand.

A full bee package (three pounds of bees and a queen) cost about $65 in 2004, when Chicago had maybe 50 to 100 backyard beekeepers, Barton said.

Now, with more than 900 Chicago hobbyists, hotels and restaurants in on the trend (City Hall has had hives since 2003), that same bee heap can run as high as $175, depending on source, type and genetics.

One highly sought genetic trait is hygiene, which in bees includes the ability to detect and remove bee pupae infested with verroa mites, a possible cause of colony collapse disorder, the unknown plague destroying honey bee populations around the world.

Thursday’s class, Barton said, was Beekeeping 101. Colony collapse is 102.

As the rain pittered on the park shelter roof, as the smoker puffed a collection of mulch and egg cartons into an empty demonstration hive, as people eyed the community garden’s dino kale and still-green tomatoes and as the puppy stayed adorable, we talked about a future without bees.

None of us wanted to know what that would be like.

Read about a very different kind of honey bee

More bees (sort of)

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I’ve had a night.

Maybe it wasn’t as much a night as the young white man’s night, but it was a night.

I dug into the hidden tunnel beneath the downtown Loop area — that’s Monday’s story if all goes according to plan. The photographer and I (it’s going to be quite a piece on Monday) went to an artists’ lofty private club called Soho House after digging among the city’s lost refuse.

There, we laughed and joked amid the skyscrape view bars. I dipped my hand into the open-air pool to confirm that, yes, it was heated. My friend told me people can swim there all winter and that, yes, I do have the artistic cred to join the social club with the stories of bars, hotels and pools if I so saw fit.

He would sponsor me, he said.

We laughed and joked and shared stories among the literati glitterati to top the night with one of the best hamburgers I’ve ever had.

The bone marrow is the key to the burgers, my friend said.

And now, bookcased between my crash and burn job, an eve spent toiling among the downtown refuse and a young white man who has since disappeared save an occasional phlegmy moan, I was among the brilliant.

I was excellent for a night.

I’m finishing this at what the laptop tells me is 1:59 a.m. The train came. I went home.

There’s no real difference between the me of the underground tunnel and the me of the lofty downtown art club. Not definitively, at least.

But it feels different, doesn’t it? One feels real and normal and me. The other feels like a guy who should be poking around tunnels standing on the roof of a downtown club, looking out at the beauty of a downtown he’s seen from the bottom up.

It’s going to be quite a piece on Monday.

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Read about an old lady who ran a cash register store out of that same area

On Thursday night, amid the hip and trendy of the West Loop crowd, among a sea of identical men in business casual and women so beautiful and bland they could have been cranked out of a Beautiful Bland Barbie factory, I finally got the Au Cheval cheeseburger, which both Bon Appetit and the Food Network recently crowned best burger in the nation.

First, the verdict: It’s not the best burger in the United States, in the Midwest or even in the sliver of experience with burgers this one guy here has had. That would be Booches in Columbia, Mo.

Yes, it’s unfair to judge a restaurant for not being the best in the nation. But I didn’t see them turning anyone away, even as our wait time topped two and an half hours. If they get to profit off the hype, we get to judge them on the hype.

So the burger was… fine. Good even. But it’s big, fatty meat with an egg on it. That’s pretty hard to mess up.

Two hours plus of drinking in nearby bars during the wait helped the mood for food as well. The place still didn’t live up.

But my point’s not to review the food or to drive people toward or away from it. It was a wonderful birthday and I’m glad I had the experience, even if the burger left me several hours later with a roiling tummy and a sense of ennui.

My goal with this project is to create a sense of time, place and identity. My goal is for someone years later to stumble across my corner of the Internet and say, “Yep. That’s what it was like.”

I review cities, not hamburgers.

I was a little unfair when I described the crowd swamping the formerly industrial Randolph Street and the Fulton Market District as identical. They weren’t all Business Casual Kens and Beautiful Bland Barbies amid the converted warehouses.

They were, however, trying to be.

Whether they fit the mold of unaffectedly trendy, wealthy and worldly on food, drink and artisanal craft whatsahoozit or not, they — we — dressed, acted, walked and talked the part. The men, myself included, all wore button-ups and slacks. The women, my date included, all wore jaunty little sundresses.

I was reminded of intermission at an opera. Everyone had the same uncomfortable look on their faces, as if they couldn’t wait to get home and take off the uniforms they had donned for a night.

There are actually stats and figures on who we were all trying to dress, act and look like for the night. The Fulton Market Type is a median 32.8 years old, overwhelmingly in the professional workforce, with a median income of $106,902, according to a ridiculously specific website by a local developer that made its name flipping industrial space into playgrounds for the high-end.

Along Green Street, a line of second-shift men in hardhats squatted alongside Bridgford Quality Foods, huffing smokes during their break. They were entirely black. The restaurant crowds in sundresses and button-ups flocking Randolph was racially diverse, but overwhelmingly white.

I say this not as a indictment of us but as an observation. We played while the men in hardhats packaged frozen bread dough, biscuits, cinnamon roll doughs, sandwiches, beef jerky, snacks and deli foods.

The 2.5-hour-plus wait for a table wasn’t a surprise. We knew that was coming. It was part of the night’s plan.

Now, the summary. The nice, pat, what-does-it-all-mean ending wherein I damn a place as exploitive or praise it as a place of fun, fancy and expression with cooking.

I had a wonderful brunch at the nearby Little Goat once, another place with multi-hour waits and food people blog about.

I once made an old lady cry by asking her why her Randolph Street cash register repair shop was failing.

In the end, I don’t know. Change is the retch after getting punched in the stomach. Transition from smokers in hardhats and little old ladies weeping over repair shops seems somehow more violative when it’s committed by developers who say things like “We target overlooked and undervalued assets in emerging locations and transform them into high-demand strategic destinations to maximize value.”

But the developers didn’t drive off the industry. They just flipped the land when other forces made American industry a hip retro concept.

The neighborhood has changed to a playground, so I shouldn’t judge people for playing. I played too. Again, a wonderful birthday.

But here we are in 2015, in a neighborhood once filled with industry and repair shops, waiting in nearby bars for texts to tell us we’re three hours in to ordering blog-rated cheeseburgers.

Yep. That’s what it was like.

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Gold-tinged women standing over the Great Hall, each with one arm pulling a waving cloak over her head to shade from the barrel-vaulted skylight above. Each goddess hoists a bird with her free arm. One, an owl to symbolize night. One, a rooster. For day.

The goddesses stand hiding from above, overlooking a massive marble room of Corinthian columns, Christmas decorations and people taking selfies.

Under seasonally colored banners hung like in a medieval hall, they snapped pictures. Beneath cloth-and-wire ornaments dangling over the Union Station staircase where Andy Garcia stopped the baby carriage in that movie, they lazily flipped through phones and tablets, texting and left-swiping as they walked.

The sounds of a train station crowd — footsteps on marble, updates on train departures, laughing voices blended by space and echo to a light hum and bustle — all punctuated by the “click-whir” of short audio files some phones play to pretend camera shutters are snapping.

A Christmas display filled the middle portion of the hall’s back. A smatter of different-sized trees decorated in lights, golden baubles and red plastic steam engines.

The largest towered over the room, drawing crowds for selfies. Young couples, families. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Broadly Midwestern white stereotypes in college football sweatshirts and Santa hats. Middle Eastern women in hijabs paused to take their own pictures among the Christmas cheer.

Children ran up to the tree. Couples sauntered and cooed at the romance.

And they all snapped, whirred, clicked their tablets and phones, frowning at the results of some of the photos and then, swipe of the finger, breaking into a glow at how the next one came out.

More machines. More cameras. More mobile devices with enabled wifi and data plans to make sure you are never separated from the ones you love, not even to interact with the ones you’re in the room with.

A female voice over the loudspeaker said “Test.” Christmas music started playing. James Brown.

There were a few scattered people-watchers among the crowd of swipers and texters. An elderly black lady in a rather large hat. A young Indian woman who kept her legs crossed and one hand on her jaw, occasionally smiling at nothing. A gape-mouthed white woman.

Some bobbed their heads around chicken-like to take in as much as possible. Some darted their eyes around. Some just stared forward. The few scattered among the swipers all wanted to swallow the scene, consigning the moment to neurons rather than pixels.

But each of the people-watchers, to a person, myself included, checked their phone. Took a picture. Sent a text. Not one of us didn’t.

An old loon buttonholed a man disassembling a bicycle to ask him how it was done. They talked for about 10 minutes, having a more human experience than my judgmental people-watching could ever allow.

But these were the exceptions. Mostly, the crowd used flat, square machines with rounded corners to announce to the Great Hall that they didn’t want to be there and announce to the Internet that they were.

Why would you choose to sing carols with random guy taking the Wolverine from Chicago to Detroit when Amtrak could pump in James Brown? Why would you talk to the person who happened to cop a squat on the pew next to you when pressing a button on a little gizmo in your pocket means hearing the voice of the person you love most in the world?

Why would you choose to interact with this flawed, compromised, uncontrollable world when there’s a better, safer, cleaner one in your pocket? One where you can just delete the image of you that didn’t turn out the way you wanted.

The goddesses of Union Station used their cloaks to shade themselves from the world. We’ve chosen a different way.

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Learn more about the Great Hall

Read a random story from 1,001 Chicago Afternoons

Now she’s back to tell you a little more.

…

“A woman can’t show anything below the top of her areola,” Lady Ginger said. “So if a woman is wearing a plunging neckline that shows anything on the side, she’s technically in violation of Chicago’s decency laws.”

Lady Ginger and I were looking at ladies.

We were in Studio L’Amour on that stretch of the Near West Side where old factory buildings are starting to host farm-to-table restaurants.

It’s a traditional dance studio with a mirrored wall and windows that let in light. Untraditional in that the walls are lined with photos of Satan’s Angel, Toni Elling, Dusty Summers, Tura Satana, Sally Rand and other burlesque rock stars of times past.

Although that’s traditional too.

“I love the history of it,” the lawyer in the burlesque studio said. “I am kind of a history buff anyway. So I love knowing that we are in some small way, sort of carrying on what these women who, really for their time period — you want to talk about feminists in a really unusual way? These women, they made their own careers, they had their own lives, they made their own money. They lived their lives the way they wanted to. And I love the idea that we’re sort of trying to carry on that same tradition of what those women did.”

Ginger, 44, came to burlesque at 36 when a friend of hers had a boyfriend and the boyfriend suggested sexy belly dance lessons. The friend was researching dance studios for said sexy lessons and asked Ginger to help with the research.

That’s when Ginger met instructor Michelle L’Amour, who mentioned her small but growing burlesque classes. Ginger started going. Ginger got hooked.

“I liked that it was OK to be sexy,” Ginger said. “I was really drawn to sort of the glamour of it. And at that point, especially, I really liked the challenge. It was completely different from anything I’d ever tried before and yet I didn’t feel that it was beyond the realm of me being able to do it.”

Ginger and I were in agreement that the “By day she’s _____, but by night she dances” is a facile and easy story. But there are details that need to be covered.

Lady Ginger, not her real name of course, is a lawyer. She’s a court coordinator who works for a judge. The judge is cool with it and coworkers have even come to see her show, which, in her words, was awkward the next day for a couple of seconds, but everyone got over it.

Now Ginger is one of the mainstays of Michelle L’Amour’s troupe and an instructor at her studio. Her parents come to see her shows.

“My dad’s always loved the whole Rat Pack and all of that stuff. So I think he sort of got what burlesque was from the get-go. We talk about it all the time. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I get it. It’s an art form. You’re being sexy, but it’s an art form. I get it. Whatever.’ But my mom had to realize that we were being protected, that we were working good venues. That we weren’t out in some dive some place working a show. That we were being paid for what we do. That we have people looking out for us at shows.

“What’s really funny is, the girls in the troupe. They don’t watch me perform. They watch my parents watch me perform. And then I’ll come back and like, ‘Your dad. He was just up on his feet clapping and your mom had a big smile on her face. She just thought you were so cute.’”

We talked about pasty-chafed nipples and we talked about the politics of being sexy. Ginger told me who “Ginger” is on stage.

“Ginger is a super dirty bump and grinder. Like, a real old school, heavy-hipped bump and grind.”

She told me about running errands after shows.

“So I’ve got eyelashes and big red lips and all this crazy makeup. And I’m in a T-shirt and yoga pants and gym shoes and I have to stop at the grocery store to pick something up on the way home. That’s my favorite thing in the whole world. Because the looks you get in a grocery store are awesome. So I actually kind of get a kick out of it. I kind of love re-entering the normal world with just a little bit of the burlesque sort of following me around as I do it.”

Lady Ginger told me about safety.

“We used to have an actual hand signal that we could give if we were in trouble. Not ‘in trouble’ like necessarily someone’s threatening but, like, we just want to get out of this conversation that we’re having. Because it’s just going on too long or getting creepy. And we would use the hand signal, and inevitably one of the husbands would come over and be like, ‘Hey, we need you over here.’ And they could pull you away from this person.”

Then, the big question I end all interviews with. What didn’t I ask? What didn’t we cover that you would want people reading this to know?

By now we were sitting by a couch in a comfortable corner of the studio. Lady Ginger, variously taglined “the Baroness of Bump,” “That’s Why the Lady is a Vamp” and “She Just Doesn’t Give a Fuck” thought for a moment.

“You know, the biggest thing that I think gets lost in with burlesque a lot of times, and is that it truly is an art form. And it is truly, uniquely, American art form. The burlesques that you know today, that are known all over the world, they really did start here in America. And it’s frustrating when you take the time to study it and really work on it and put your time and energy into it, to not have people realize that it’s an art form, you know what I mean?

“It’s more than just putting on a piece of music and taking my clothes off. There’s actual like thought process and whatnot. And if there’s anything in this world that I would love people to know about burlesque, it is, there is an art to it. There is a history to it. There is a uniqueness about it. I would love for people to take more time to realize that.”

Lady Ginger told me what it’s like.

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Read part one

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Read #100

And read story #1 where it all started

The man with the vest ignored the yelling man and crossed the street. I started to realize how wrong a turn I had made.

On Tuesday night, the Chicago Blackhawks lost 1-0 to the Anaheim Ducks after Devante Smith-Pelly scored with what the Tribune called a “nifty stick-handling move.”

On Tuesday night, with 20 minutes left on the car share car, I turned a small, Enterprise-owned Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car left onto Madison Street, not knowing the game was letting out with a sea of red jerseys and booze buses blasting “Chelsea Dagger.”

Mine was not a nifty move.

The first clue something was awry was the pedicabs, those bicycle/rickshaws that have taken over Chicago tourist events the last five or so years. First one, then another, slowly growing in number like the playground scene in “The Birds,” if you replace Tippi Hedren’s attack crows with thin, angry men pedaling unsmiling tourists through an October night.

Then, the red jerseys. Men, women, children, all laughing and cheering (some stumbling) as they poured out of the United Center in waves and waves of red like the elevator door scene in “The Shining” if we want to keep the classic horror film metaphors rolling.

Now there is a word that sports fans don’t like to hear, but one that is accurate nonetheless. It’s a pre-existing word that describes when someone, for whatever reason, decides to dress as the people they see on TV.

That word is “cosplay.”

When sports fans dress in the special jerseys of Kane, Toews or any of the other star Blackhawks, they are not making a special homage to a beloved figure. They’re cosplaying, as surely as any “Game of Thrones”-garbed nerd at Comic Con.

They dress in someone else’s work uniform. It would be like wearing a janitor’s shirt that says “Lenny” because Lenny mops really well.

I like sports, I do. I don’t care for them as much as, say art, or music, or movies, or literature, or theater, or cooking, or grammar, or webcomics, or free point-and-click games online, or… I forgot where I was going with this.

But somehow it seems sports fans get a bye on the absolute nerdery of their passion.

Sports fandom seems to the outsider to be based on cosplay, obsession and memorizing long lists of numbers. How much time must it take to quiz yourself on standings, wins, losses, free throw percentage, average time on ice, ERAs, RBIs, opponent third down conversions in the red zone in games played on natural grass against left-handed quarterbacks of Dutch origin whose mothers’ maiden names had consecutive vowels?

They stare at Patrick Kane in a shirt that claims they’re Patrick Kane and somehow they’re the cool ones?

Mired in a sea of sports fans in a small electric car, I thought about all these things. I inched the car down the road in an effort to get home.

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More tales of Blackhawks fans

Her name is Lady Ginger. That’s the name she asked appear in this story and that’s all you really need. This story will have a part two and maybe even a part three, with description and background and even an illustration of Ginger in her full burlesque regalia.

But that will come later. Right now, she’s going to take you to the moment where she’s standing in the wings, waiting to be called.

She’s going to take you through butterflies and pasties and the “stage kittens” waiting to pick up the pieces of clothing she is about to drop, one by one, in front of a room full of strangers.

Lady Ginger of Michelle L’Amour’s Chicago Starlets is going to tell you what it’s like to take off your clothes.

Listen to an MP3 of this story

“Well, what’s usually happening is you get done with the opening group number, whatever the opening group number happens to be. And then you’re just rushing and rushing and rushing to get yourself ready. Because even if you’re not till the end of the show, you’re like, ‘Nope, I need to get in my costume right now.’ Because the last thing you want to do is be panicking, have something go wrong while you’re like, two numbers away from your number and you’re supposed to be in the wings and that type of thing.

“So you’re immediately just getting ready, your hands are shaking, because you’re running on the adrenaline of having just come off stage. It’s painful because you’re usually just ripping off one set of pasties to put on another set of pasties. Which is not comfortable at all.

“Our dressing rooms are not what you see in the movies. They’re not like these glamorous, well-lit, beautiful, makeup-tabled places. You’re sitting on the dirty carpet of a stage on the top floor, or you’re crammed into what is really a storage space, trying to get your stockings on, get your shoes on, not run anything, not lose anything, not tear anything, not break anything.

“You’re comfortable talking with the other girls. We’re obviously all friends, but there’s a lot of that nervous, sort of joking and chit chatting and that type of thing. If you’re lucky, you get to watch somebody else perform, which is always exciting. Because it also calms you down. You can watch the audience, then, and get a feel for their mood and what they like and what they don’t like. Sort of what you’re going to walk into when it’s your turn.

“I usually go down two numbers before my number. I don’t want to be going down just the number right before me. I want a chance to be on the right level, because sometimes you’re upstairs, sometimes you’re not on the same level as the stage. You could be up a flight of stairs, or whatever. I actually want my feet planted on the floor that I’m going to be walking out onto.

“In my head I’m usually running through the number. Sometimes visibly running through it. Especially if it is a new number. Just marking it, or what we call marking it, which is sort of half doing it. You’re not full out performing it backstage. And really, just taking deep breaths.

“I don’t get nervous, like, scared nervous anymore. Unless it’s a brand new number, and then sometimes I am really nervous. Because, you know, it’s a debut.

“But I get excited. I get those butterflies but they’re excited butterflies. I’m just really anxious. I just want to get out there. I just want to do this. Right now. And I get really excited and it’s fun and then as I know they’re getting ready for me, I just get this incredible calm that just sort of comes over me. All of the background noise of the other girls or the stage kittens or whatever, that are to the side of me, that actually goes completely away. I don’t hear them anymore.

“And I’m literally just waiting and laughing, usually, because the host will probably tell like a funny something about you. ‘Lady Ginger was upstairs and blah, blah, blah.’ I am so dialed in to what’s about to go on stage that I am laughing, I am doubled over, I am cracking up. But I am completely calm. And just waiting for them to exit the stage so I can get on the stage.”

“Wow,” I whisper.

“Yeah,” she says.

Lady Ginger’s going to be back in a few weeks to tell you a little more.

Read part two

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See Lady Ginger in action

More on Chicago burlesque

It wasn’t a garage like on a house for a Civic when your high school son’s terrible punk band isn’t practicing. It was more like a truck loading area for a gray stone building at Monroe and Morgan.

And in this garage with the high doors pulled back to look onto a loading bay full of kegs and plants, shelves and shoppers.

“What is this place?” I asked an employee through the open garage door.

“It’s just a hobby shop,” he said. “Gardening and home brew.”

“Is that hops?” I asked, gesturing at a plywood cube open at the front to reveal a floor of small green plants and a ceiling of grow lights.

“Naah, that’s habanero peppers,” he said. “Hops has to be outside. It’s so big. The root base is like,” here he gestured an area the size of a hula hoop around him.

He was chubby and tall with a beard. A pleasant hippie. As he looked around the garage where he worked, I thought…

OK, are they gone? Have I driven the casual readers off? Is it just us?

Hi, it’s Paul. And I’m taking the day off. Shh.

Don’t get me wrong, the home brew shop story is true. There was a nice, slightly heavy hippie who gestured like a hula hoop at the size of hops. And it was a nice, slightly heavy moment of realization about how quickly quirks and oddities become mainstream – I mean, it was a chain garden/home brew store, for pity’s sake. A chain!

But yes yes, nice moment of realization of the wholeness of the human experience through the little moments. Good stuff.

I’m taking the day off.

I’m going to take a hellishly long bike ride and then buy a six-pack to bring to the first of the weekend’s two barbecues. I’m going to eat like three or four hot dogs if they have them.

I’m going to sleep as late as my body will allow.

There are all sorts of reasons I could claim for this. Social reasons, social justice reasons, the fact people deserve a holiday off and the fact I’m spending the rest of the weekend on a freelance story and reading a book on “branding” to catch up at work.

But really, I want to and I get to.

You do too.

Work if you have to, rest if you’re able to. Do something stupid and amazingly fun if you’re willing. Be smart. Carpe the diem while caveating the emptor. Eat a hot dog. Drink a beer. Play bags poorly or just take a moment to relax and stretch and say, “Yeah.”

Yeah.

Anyway, the happiest of Fourths to all of you.

Now back to the story to fool the people who just cut to the end.

“Do you have hops here?” I asked.

“At home,” he said.

It was true, I thought. It was true.

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Not everyone gets the day off

That’s right.

Over the next few weeks, Joe and I will be traveling through Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey, which makes it really hard to scout for stories in Albany Park and Beverly. I’ve loaded up as many stories in advance as my schedule allows, but there were a few gaps. So you’re in for a treat.

From 2008-10, I was the alternative culture blogger at the late and much-missed Windy Citizen. My blog, Getting Strange, ended up being a proto-1,001 Chicago Afternoons, with me chasing after adventure and weirdness with cosmologists, burlesque dancers, punks, zinesters, clowns, metalheads and the other strange crew that makes up this city of ours.

The Windy Citizen went offline in 2012, but I loaded up on pdfs of my stories before the site’s final day. So during my father-son globetrot, I’ll be filling some 1,001 holes with old Windy Citizen stories. Each old Getting Strange will have an italicized preamble like this so the 2008 stuff doesn’t get confused with the 2014.

I’ve given the old stories some polish and a few mercy edits, but welcome to this brief and, for me, horrifying look at how I wrote in my 20s.

This story originally ran June 15, 2008 and was titled “All bike rides should be naked.”

…

My mom will be happy when she finds out I wore my bicycle helmet. She probably won’t be so happy when she finds out I didn’t wear pants.

I went to the Chicago leg of the World Naked Bike Ride, folks. And I had a blast.

The event is a world-wide one, with events in 70 cities in 20 countries. I didn’t realize how cool that was until a completely nude girl from Indiana named Diana mentioned that people were naked or semi-naked biking in Portland, Ore., and London, England, on the same day as we were.

It’s ostensibly about biking as a fun mode of transportation, about the environment, about the damage our car-centric society is wreaking on the world and about the negative associations nudity has with obscenity and poor body image.

And it was about that. But there were a lot of people there who just wanted to get naked on bikes.

For me, the night started at 6 p.m., when I left my heavily Hispanic neighborhood in the midst of loud, honking celebration of Puerto Rican Day. I was wearing shorts I had recently created out of a pair of khakis with a hole in the knee and a short-sleeved button-up.

Underneath were the boxers I soon realized the world would see. Unless, of course, I decided to go totally nude once I got there.

That was a question in my mind as I pedaled to the rendezvous point in Union Park on Ashland, specifically by the statue of Carter Henry Harrison. Would I go nude or would my novelty “Hot Stuff” boxers with the little chili peppers stay on once the shirt and shorts went into my backpack?

I thought about this as I rode by families celebrating, by children playing with sparklers, by churches and by restaurants where elderly couples were looking at each other and realizing their love had lasted time.

I went too far on Ashland and got a little lost. But I straightened myself out shortly.

I got to the statue of Carter Henry, who Wikipedia tells me was Chicago’s mayor from 1879 to 1887. There was a cluster of 15 to 20 people around poor Carter. All clothed. All somewhat confused-looking. All casting sideways glances at the cop who was there.

I struck up a conversation with a guy who had a vaguely German accent. He was nice, but as confused as I was.

Eventually, someone came up and whispered directions to the real rendezvous point to us. I wrote it down, which later led me to the dismal circumstance of having to repeat it to other wannabe nudists who looked at me as if I knew what I was talking about.

So I rode to the spot. And holy shit.

It was what appeared to be an abandoned factory with a gigantic cell phone tower possibly irradiating us. There were a smattering of people – some nude, some semi-nude, most getting body painting done.

There’s a strange reckoning that comes when faced with a sea of multi-gendered naked people. At first it’s the, holy crap, they’re naked! That’s some girl’s boobs! That’s some guy’s stuff! That’s some girl’s stuff!

Then, when you realize that, yeah, they’re naked, you start to notice differences. For me, as a guy, it started as “Huh, she has really big ones.” Or, “Huh, hers are perky.” Or, “Huh, I’m having a conversation with a totally naked pudgy guy named Jeff and we’re talking about our respective farmer’s tans.”

The age range was enormous. I think the most beautiful woman I saw had to be 60 if she was a day. She was completely naked, walking around with her husband. He was a hirsute beast decorated with body paint declaring slogans about stopping the deforestation of his forest.

She was old. Fallen tits and saggy ass, like any meathead description of an older woman would be. But she was lovely. Her front was decorated with an elegant array of leaves and vines, circling her form like grape vines clinging to a weathered but still useful and vibrant wooden frame.

Her back just said “My bush would make a better president.”

Boxers on, I told the body paint girl to only do my front, as I would be wearing my backpack. I told her, who I had recently seen adorning her own body with flowers painted via a mirror, to go crazy with it. She balked, so I suggested a big hot pepper, like the ones on my undies. Go with a theme, I thought.

It was a long time of naked waiting. The e-mail said the ride would start at 9 sharp, but there were delays. People willing to strip down and ride through Chicago are not a breed that easily handles delays and being kept in a cage.

Then, finally, the ride started.

Wow. Just, wow. We were celebrities. Cars stopped. The cops blocked traffic. People yelled and took cell-phone pictures and video. Some looked with disgust, most with hollers, appreciation and high fives as we went by.

Despite the organizers’ desire to keep everyone at least body-painted over their bits, some people were just riding in the nip.

Some weren’t. Some had boxers with chili peppers and had to decide whether to pull them off or not.

We went up Michigan Avenue. We went through Bucktown, Lincoln Park and around and around that damn gas station at Fullerton and Ashland. As I told Diana, I think they might have chosen the route for maximum discomfort for the locals.

I don’t care what anyone says. And there were motorists very unhappy we were blocking the roads. But we, or at least I, felt like gods.

There was a party afterwards, but that story comes down to typical party stuff. Music. Impromptu dance lessons from drunk girls. Saw that someone tried to chop through my bike lock but failed. Go, Master Lock. Riding a bike home and realizing how stultifying it was to be forced back into shorts and a button-up.

As for the question you might be asking yourself – did Paul give the crowds “The Full Monty,” “The Whole Nine Yards,” the… ummm… “The Sandlot”?

I hate to be a tease.

I must make it, however, a mystery. It is a mystery that will only be solved when you read the last part of this sentence, which is about how my junk was totally flapping in the breeze at points. Sorry, Mom.

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Read another tale from the same spot

“Two points!” he called, throwing his arms up in the air and turning to me. “From the blue line!”

“Nice!” I called back, as non-committal as I could make it sound.

Encouraged, the man walked up next to me at the bus stop at Ashland and Madison.

The section of the Near West Side by Union Park is an area in transition, as they say. It’s public housing next to glitz union offices, vacant lots next to the first peekings of new restaurants. It’s an area still trying to decide if they’ll let the muggers or the condo association take your money.

“Can you see it?” the old man said, leaning out into the street to look for the No. 9 bus. “I think I see it, coming over the bridge, but it might be truck running lights.”

The old man wore a ratty, stained blue hoodie with the hood pulled over a Bears baseball cap. He had thick, new glasses in frames that would be hipster stylish if that’s what he had been going for.

His bearded face had that desiccated Santa look old white men get if no one’s there to care for them. He spoke, smiled, joked and laughed through a toothless gap that ran between his canines.

I liked him a lot. He was kind and entertaining. And completely enjoying having an audience.

“That’s why I live over there with the nuts,” he said, finishing a story I hadn’t noticed him starting.

He gestured at a high rise I would later find out was called the Patrick Sullivan Apartments.

“The nuts and the old people. I’m the token white boy,” he said. “It’s for old people but they ran out of old people, so they let in anyone who’s 55 or older. HUD gives you a good deal. You never pay more than 30 percent. I don’t tell people how much I pay for rent because people get mad at me.”

His blue eyes matched mine for a moment and he smiled between the gap in his teeth.

“I decided to go to mass,” he said, launching into a story that started as how residents have to reserve an elevator in the building but the more he talked I realized had become about the previous bus being too crowded.

“So I step back, back, back,” the story about the elevator or bus repeated several times.

The rest is bits and blurs, a whirlwind of talk from the smiling, blue-eyed man with the gap where teeth should be. Cars, joggers, walkers, bikes all went by as the man kept talking.

“On the weekends they go to the hospital and run them right up and you see it and it’s a 126, but you can’t see that so you’re like ‘All right, all right’ and then it goes by,” he said at one point.

“I couldn’t decide whether to go to praise Jesus or to go to the park and annoy the shit out of my friends there,” he said at another. “If I get the one bus, I go to this church. If I get this other one, I go to that church. If I get on this third bus, I go to that church. Or the park. Talk to my friends.”

“Which one did you go to?” I asked.

“I went up to Chicago. They have a park district facility there with a track that goes ‘round,” he said, drawing a horizontal loop in the air with his hand.

“Chicago?” I asked.

“Chicago and Lake Shore Drive,” he said.

“Ah. I thought you meant Chicago and Ashland.”

“No, no, no. Chicago and Lake Shore. They have a park up there and I go up and annoy my friends.”

He smiled and looked around at the scene, at the vacant lots by union offices and the area deciding if it wanted to be heaven or hell.

“They interrupt me,” he said. “Not like you. And when they interrupt me, I’m so old I can’t remember what the fuck I was talking about.”

The bus arrived.

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Read about other people met on the street:

• A drunk
• A unicycle salesman
• Jugglers
• A kind man
• A man in a hat
• A musician
• An artist
• The Great Chicago Friar
• A tightrope walker
• A bather
• A penile protester
• Dancers
• A cyclist with a prosthetic leg
• Everything