The “favorite” is the top athlete they like and can admit to liking. The socially acceptable one. The one you can show off to your friends and take home to momma.

But everyone has a shameful, secret, actual favorite. Like a scandal-plagued athlete who you can’t admit still inspires you most, or one who became a joke but you still can’t get out of your head. Lance Armstrong. Tiger Woods. Pre-North Korea Dennis Rodman.

My ”favorite” is Ryne Sandberg. But my actual, secret favorite is the immortal Lennie Merullo, who had a secret darker than blood doping, the ladies or whatever the hell happened to Dennis Rodman because that dictatorship stuff just went off the rails.

Lennie Merullo, my hero, was a really lousy baseball player.

I’ve sung Lennie’s praises before, but here are some key points:

• Played in the ‘40s, but was so bad Mike Royko made fun of him in his yearly Cubs quiz until the ‘80s. He stopped when Merullo wrote him a nice, respectful letter about his storied career as a scout.
• Was the last surviving member of the 1945 World Series team, so for a few years was the only living human to play in a World Series as a Cub.
• Kept picking at a scab he got during the Series so he would have a scar as souvenir.
• Seemed to have that combination of true love for the game and being a truly nice guy that seems to appeal to people like me who don’t care if an athlete is “great” or “good” or “competent at the sport in question.”

But my love truly springs from the second game of a double header against the Boston Braves in 1942, when Lennie Merullo set a standard for terrible that stands today.

All day, he had been tired, nervous, distracted and completely off what was already his limited game. But the worst was to come. In the second inning of the second game, Merullo made four errors — four “boots,” in the baseball slang of the time. That record of four errors in a single inning has never been broken and wouldn’t even be tied until 1986.

Terrible, and I will always love Lennie Merullo for it.

The reason for Len Merullo’s terrible game was named Len Merullo Jr., born back in Chicago while his dad was at an away game in Boston. My hero had just gotten word. He botched a game for love.

The new parents never called Len Jr. anything other than “Boots.”

If there is a point to this story, it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind. I’ve told this story before, and I’m not entirely sure I got all the details right this time around. I’m tired, nervous, distracted and completely off what’s already my limited game.

As of about 4 this morning, I have a reason too.

We’re not going to call it Boots.

The concrete below shook and rattled with every car that sped by just feet behind us.

The Wednesday fireworks are over at Navy Pier. There’s a last set tonight in honor of the weekend that, for all intents and purposes, ends summer. But the ones that run every Wednesday night while the city’s hot and the bicycles used exploded over harbor and town for the last time in 2017.

The last show is cicadas. It’s pop-up ads for back-to-school sales. The last Navy Pier fireworks show of summer stands alongside Halloween stores and Christmas ads as indicator summer is in its final throes.

So we stood by a highway to watch it.

It was my wife’s idea, not mine. We had been driving up Lakeshore Drive, that massive highway that traces the lake, a few weeks earlier when we noticed the overpass by Navy Pier lined with parked cars there to watch the show.

It looked fun, so for the last Wednesday show of the year and one car trip where I had to keep my eyes closed the whole time so as not to spoil the surprise, we found ourselves one of those cars parked on an overpass, staring out at dark water and fire-brightened sky as cars plunged at highway speeds just a few feet behind.

Next to a man comprised of muscles, flat-brimmed ballcap and neck tattoos by a car full of a “wow”-”wow”-”Dad did you see that one!” Latino boy half crawling out the window, we watched the millionaires’ yachts cruise through silent waters. We watched a few bikes whiz by the lakefront path. We saw a molasses tide of walkers ooze their way to Navy Pier for a shot at the show.

Among whirring cars and condo towers shooting rakish to the sky, we watched the world explode above.

For a moment our city came together, if just to stare at the sky. Yes, it’s the circus part of “bread and circuses.” Yes, it’s a diversion from crime, poverty, systemic segregation.

But god bless the circus in the sky, just for making us remember why we live here. God bless lake waters and moments where by silent consent, a city decides a highway overpass is a viewing platform.

This town grates and drains. It drains with a smile now, at least in my neck of the woods. It wears us down with promises of craft cocktails and that the next featureless glass box condo will make us care about our landscape in a way the previous 50 hadn’t. Dive bars crash. Bungalows make way for urban McMansions. My city strips away the special to replace it with a pleasant enough strip-mall conformity.

Each day, prices rise. Each day, it’s harder to be poor in a city increasingly for the millionaires.

For a moment, though, we all look at the sky. Millionaires and the poor. I don’t watch from yachts, and they don’t watch from highway overpasses. We’re not together yet, but at least we’re looking at the same fire-flowers in the night.

Why we protect the lakefront

Sites you can see along the water

Now let’s talk about the lake.

Chicago exists because of water, with the early 1830s land boom that created the city a byproduct of a plan to dig a canal connecting the Chicago River to the Illinois River and, via that, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

As far back as 1836, a year before the town of Chicago became the city of Chicago, the lakefront was deemed “Public Ground—Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.”

The rules protecting this land have changed over the years — the Field Museum wouldn’t be able to build on the lake by today’s laws, as George Lucas can attest. But that guiding principle of a public lakefront is why Chicago has open fields, beaches and bike paths instead of private beaches divvied between condo developments like Miami, or skyscrapers all the way up to the water like Manhattan.

This tour isn’t about the rules; it’s about the people who pushed their buildings further and further into parkland, “transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground of the educated rich” as Montgomery Ward put it in the early 1900s.

I’ve written about some of these places before, and there you can find links to stories about how people use this lake. Other spots on the tour I left silent for you to wonder and maybe research how this got there.

Six seconds might not seem like a long time, but try it sometime. Sit in silence for six seconds at a peppy Streeterville coffee shop after work on a Friday while Fatboy Slim’s 1998 hit “The Rockafeller Skank” blasts about funk soul brothers overhead and you’re trying to explain to a virtual stranger with a digital recorder why you love something you love.

“Sometimes it’s the smell?” she said, laughing.

She fumbled for a few second, the first time she had been at a loss for words in a conversation that covered birds, insects, French librarian Suzanne Briet’s 1951 essay “What is Documentation?” and Chicago’s forgotten Wingfoot Air Express blimp crash that killed 13 people in 1919.

She talked about the 17 bookshelves at her house, about the joy of picking up a physical object, about the deeper way she processes information when reading a book. She said things, but couldn’t come up with any overarching theme.

It was like I had asked her to describe being in love, or the taste of a banana. Hard to come up with something encompassing in six seconds with Clinton-era funk remixes blasting overhead.

“The experience of reading a book, an actual book, over reading it on a screen — there’s no comparison,” she finally said.

That’s why, in 2017, Elisa Shoenberger is co-founding a literary magazine. Print, not online. Held in hand, not downloaded. With all the costs and frustrations that entails.

“About 90 percent of my friends were like, ‘Yep, that’s a terrible idea,’ including the ones in publishing,” Shoenberger said. “But I had a couple people say, ‘Y’know, why not?’”

She and co-founder Meghan McGrath have taken on the added cost, rare in modern publishing, of paying each and every contributor for their work rather than asking for volunteerism or offering to pay in “exposure.”

It’s called The Antelope.

The pair based the idea and the name on that 1951 documentation essay you’ve already forgotten about because I mentioned a blimp crash right after. In “What is Documentation?” Briet explored the notion of an antelope as a document.

Silly, right? Documents are books, papers, photographs, dental records. But an antelope can be put in a zoo and studied. Its sounds can be recorded. Artists can paint it. And when the critter dies, it can be dissected, stuffed, mounted and put in a natural history museum to tell people what it was like.

“It has all these different things that can generate information from something that is definitely not something we think of as a document,” Shoenberger said.

Similarly, The Antelope will be a literary magazine made of forms not traditionally thought of as magazine fodder.

“The idea is the magazine has a lot of different forms of documentation. There are traditional ones like oral histories of course, nonfiction, poetry, but then it also has photographs, lists, cartoons, photo essays, etc.,” Shoenberger said. “Granted it’s still printed, so there’s no antelope — physical antelope — in it. Photos, though.”

Each issue will have a theme. The first issue’s theme is flight and, if they get there, the second will be code.

Flight will talk about birds, beekeeping, drones, the blimp disaster, the connection between early bicycle advertising and the aviation industry, the researchers who collect the bodies of birds that bash into downtown skyscrapers to study migratory patterns, stories told in everything from photos and comics to foldable paper art “storigami.”

If.

Magazines are costly, ones that pay contributors even moreso. Shoenberger and McGrath have an ongoing Kickstarter campaign to get the project moving. They’re about halfway there with 10 days left in the campaign. If the campaign doesn’t get there, The Antelope doesn’t happen.

Maybe it won’t happen, or maybe it will peter out after one issue, a single Antelope never forming a herd. Shoenberger and McGrath know this. They’re not naive.

But they can’t not do this. Something Elisa Shoenberger can’t explain given six seconds or even longer makes this endeavor an artistic risk they have to take.

She calls it their first stand.

A Logan Square bookbinder also creates the physical

On touching books older than most governments

Followers of the sect known as Christianity celebrate a special day called “Christ-mas” in which trees are slaughtered, cookies are left for fat, flying elvish deer-herders and Irishmen receive massive amounts of birds.

In case you want to purchase a gift for this regional folk festival, here are some ideas that will support a few of the people and organizations I’ve written about in the 150 stories that have appeared on this site so far in 2015.

A Tactile Magic Act

For the past 19 years, 25-year-old Jeanette Andrews has only had one job. Stage magician. And yes, the math checks.

On Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, Andrews debuts her new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Thresholds” will be an immersive magic experience by a woman who considers slight of hand a fine art. The tricks aren’t just designed to fool the eye, but to fool all five senses.

“Thresholds” is free with museum admission ($12 for adults, $7 for students and seniors), but cheapskates delight: The museum is free to Illinois residents on Tuesdays. If your loved ones ask, I’ll tell them it was really, really expensive.

If you like the illustration that accompanied my profile of Andrews, artist Marine Tempels takes commissions.

Psalm One’s Newest Album

She wasn’t mentioned by name, but rapper and Englewood native Psalm One was one of the readers at the “Welcome to the Neighborhood” reading I organized with Rachel Hyman at the MCA in January.

Psalm One’s newest album “P.O.L.Y.” or “Psalm One Loves You” was released in September of this year and can be purchased on iTunes. Psalm One’s smart, breezy style and lyrics have made her one of the freshest voices in hip-hop, pop and soul, not just out of Chicago, not just recently. Period.

If you want to learn where Psalm One gets it from, pair the album with a copy of the coming-of-age memoirs “Old School Adventures from Englewood–South Side of Chicago” by her mother, journalist Elaine Hegwood Bowen.

A Cambodian Sorcerer Hunt

What do you do when you find out your girlfriend’s dad is a sorcerer? If you’re Uptown-based journalist Ryun Patterson, you use the experience as inspiration for an interactive multimedia exploration of the changing world of traditional Cambodian magic.

“Vanishing Act: A Glimpse into Cambodia’s World of Magic” is available on print and Kindle at Amazon and downloadable for iStuff on iTunes for a holiday special of $9.99, down from $14.99.

It’s full of photographs, interviews, videos, interactive maps and pages and pages of nuanced writing detailing how the Southeast Asian nation’s traditional folk healing and fortune-telling is disappearing in some ways, going digital in others. I got it for my dad for his birthday, so I can vouch.

Oh, and Patterson married the sorcerer’s daughter.

Kink Lectures

Formed when museums wouldn’t take a dying man’s gay erotic paintings and interested collectors only wanted to hide them away, the Leather Archives & Museum in Rogers Park has become a home to all things kink and fetish.

There’s a prurient interest to a museum filled with butt plugs, whips, masks and sexy books, but the museum is an intentionally open and free space dedicated to preserving art, craft and writing that celebrates a part of life some see as shameful, dirty, to be tossed away or hidden. Whether it’s your sexuality or not, it’s someone’s.

Although tickets or a membership to the museum could be a fun thing for Santa to leave under the tree, depending on your tree and your Santa, there are also a few upcoming events of note, including lectures on kink and fetish culture and, in February, the museum’s first overnight lock-in.

Superhero Circus

More of a pre-Christmas extravaganza, but this Friday take your loved ones to Acrobatica Infiniti’s last planned show at the Uptown Underground.

Acrobatica Infiniti is a nerd circus, a celebration of all things geek and acrobatic. People tumble as superfolk, juggle as Jedi or cavort as cartoons.

My profile of the group became part of a series of circus performer profiles, with looks at Captain Hammer and his groupie, Mister Terrific and the circus’ resident Catwoman/Dark Phoenix/Breakdancing Yoshi.

And in case you liked that illustration of Dark Phoenix in action, artist Emily Torem takes commissions too.

A Night at the Turtle Races

Bowmanville bar Big Joe’s 2 & 6 has turtle racing. Take your friends.

A Really Good Photographer

OK, I don’t know what you would hire a photographer for. That’s your lookout. But AJ Kane, who did the photography for the interactive exploration of a hidden tunnel running through the downtown, is for hire.

He’s a good guy. Check out his stuff.

Little Stubby

Not to be confused with WWI hero bull terrier mutt Sergeant Stubby, Little Stubby is the nogoodnik kid brother of corrupt Chicago cop Johnny Kelly, who was competing for a tap-dancing stripper’s affections with a guy who pretends to be a robot in a nightclub’s storefront window in the 1953 insane nonsense film “City That Never Sleeps.”

You can rent that insane nonsense (seriously, the City of Chicago itself takes human form to narrate in the voice of Francis the Talking Mule) at Odd Obsession, a Bucktown video store and mecca for all things obscure and cinematic. See about a gift certificate, buy some merch or just drop by the store to check out the exhibit of Ghanaian movie posters.

Dropping my bouncy, light and frankly hilarious tone (that “regional folk festival” line was frickin’ gold), I want to support people who bring me the strange and unique ways people across the planet have expressed themselves.

Hip-hop, magic, journalism, acrobatics, movies, kink, even turtle racing — all these people and groups are the real deal. This “Christ-mas,” go beyond shopping locally. Shop exceptionally. Support the unique and beautiful.

The worst that could happen is you’ll experience something you’ll never see again.

Share your local shopping ideas

Listen to a CTA street band’s holiday song

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Every boat ride back and forth on the river on Sunday, every time we went by and I was on my mic telling tourists about the reversal of the river and how the locks work, there was a little less of it.

The wheel was being dismantled section by section, pie piece by pie piece, like a 150-foot Pac-Man that just had a ghost monster catch up.

For those who gasp and worry at the loss of the wheel, don’t worry. They’re building a bigger one in time for the pier’s 100th anniversary next year.

I don’t have as strong feelings on the wheel as many. I remember going up in it once with a woman I was dating, but the memory seems to flip back and forth between which woman it was.

It was… cold, I think?

Navy Pier’s been everything from a jail for WWI draft dodgers to the current tourist carnival and home of public radio, Shakespeare theater and stained glass museum. It’s been a naval training base and a college campus and a run-down ‘70s strip of rank and nothing.

The Tribune over the summer referred to the current incarnation as a “garish tourist trap.” I like that.

The same article called the Ferris wheel, part of a 1995 updo of the pier, an “icon.” I don’t care as much for that.

I’m sure a lot of lovely people have lovely memories of first or last kisses on the wheel. I’m sure some sensible, fine adults have a secret smile for childhood memories of what I consider a tacky monstrosity.

(For the record, my favorite place in Chicago when I was a kid was retro-themed gimmick diner Ed Debevic’s, so… no judgment.)

Sometimes, I see things that don’t exist. I picture a city with the Sun-Times building where the Trump hotel is, with the Cabrini-Green projects instead of a field and encroaching chain stores. Even a non-native like me can form an attachment to a place’s visual identity.

Someone out there will only be able to see that Ferris wheel when they picture Navy Pier. Someone else won’t be able to picture it without whatever comes next.

The ghosts caught up and Pac-Man’s dissolving. Game over.

Play again?

Meet a woman who works on Navy Pier

The pier on a Saturday night

An angering nearby tower

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They show layouts, floor plans, hand-rendered pre-construction imaginings of what would become Lake Point Tower, the modern architecture castle jutting beautifully from the land just west of Navy Pier.

And there, on the front cover of the package sent to prospective tenants back in the mid-1960s, words that made me burn: “Tower in a Park.”

Not only did they know they were turning our public parks into millionaires’ backyards, they made it part of the ad campaign.

Lake Point Tower is gorgeous. The 1968 high-rise is a revolutionary take on the International or Modern style of architecture by two former students of Ludwig Mies van der Rowe, the style’s chief proponent.

Architects George Schipporeit and John Heinrich took the glass-and-steel Miesian box and gave it a curve, creating this startling three-lobed tower at the foot of Navy Pier. It’s a testament to creativity, elegance, beauty and gaming the system to turn the people’s land into another bauble for the wealthy.

Since 1836, a year before the city incorporated, Chicago’s lakefront has been deemed “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstructions whatever.”

The lakefront changed and grew as we pushed out into it on landfill. Legal battles have been fought. Physical battles have been fought. But through hook, crook and the deep pocketbooks of A. Montgomery Ward, we managed to keep our lakefront open to the people.

We fought for grass and a cloud-dappled sky that any person, rich or poor, can enjoy. I can think of few things nobler.

There was an exception, of course. Gotta be. That exception was the mouth of the Chicago River, which has a long history of industry. The 1948 rules outlined the exact exemption: You could build harbor and terminal facilities for passenger and freight vessels between Grand Avenue north of the river and Randolph Street to the south.

And thems was the rules.

Until the 1964 “Basic Policies for the Comprehensive Plan of Chicago,” copies of which, including an old typewritten one released to the press with commentary by Hizzoner Richard J. Daley, can, like the promotional package from earlier, be found in the Harold Washington Library special collections.

“The proposed policies strongly reaffirm the 1948 Chicago Plan Commission lakefront resolution, which stated that the entire lakefront be used for recreational and cultural purposes, except for the section south of 79th Street and the section between Grand Avenue and Randolph Street.”

The words “harbor and terminal facilities for passenger and freight vessels” had vanished in a puff of Daley-era politics.

It’s like if the highway department suddenly came out with new rules that “strongly reaffirm that there is a speed limit” without saying what it is.

You’re damn right people went 90.

“The door was now open for developer Charles H. Shaw to move forward in the mid-1960s with the construction of Lake Point Tower, a 71-story high-rise near Navy Pier,” wrote Joseph P. Schewiterman and Dana M. Caspall in their 2006 book “The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago.”

Journalist Lois Wille was a little more suspicious about how that door came to be open, writing in her 1972 book “Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Historic Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront” that “… luxury high-rise apartment buildings already were scheduled to go up east of Lake Shore Drive at the foot of Randolph Street and at Grand Avenue, so the omission was not exactly an oversight.”

Lake Point Tower was on the Grand Avenue end of things. Outer Drive East was the Randolph Street development. Two huge luxury apartment complexes flanking the very zone someone thought might be nice for freight vessels.

In the early ‘70s, Harbor Point joined Outer Drive East on Randolph Street, stepping between the earlier development and the lake (ODE tenants must have been piiiiissed).

The furor around the high-rising of the lakefront, coupled with the disaster of McCormick Place convention center, which went up, burned down and was rebuilt within an 11-year period of Daley the First’s reign, led to the Lakefront Protection Ordinance of 1973.

It said in part “… in no instance will further private development be permitted east of Lake Shore Drive.”

Harbor Point, Outer Drive East and good old Lake Point Tower must have been ecstatic. No new competitors.

It’s just like LPT must have loved it in 1987, when the drive was rerouted. Outer Drive East and Harbor Point found themselves back west of the road with us proles. Lake Point Tower was now the only chance on the planet to live east of Lake Shore Drive.

They went condo the next year.

Charles H. Shaw’s obituary is typically cloying, his friends and loved ones recalling that the controversy of this middle finger on the lake was “over whether its massiveness was appropriate for its location.”

This simple lie by grieving relatives turned “Don’t sell our public land!” into “By gad, Charles, those beautiful apartments are almost TOO luxurious!”

And here we are, decades later. This tale of rich > poor has left us with a staggeringly beautiful building that no one seems to question.

On the tours I give (I’m a tour guide now), the only questions I’ve ever gotten about the building are how tall it is (71 stories), what the circle thing on top is (a restaurant) and how much it costs to live there (more than you or I will ever see in our lives).

I think of Aaron Montgomery Ward.

When Montgomery Ward died in 1913, the top headline in the Tribune wasn’t about the mail-order business that bore his name (the company wouldn’t move into chain stores until years after its namesake’s death).

The headline read “Death Takes Ward, Lake ‘Watchdog.’”

Ward’s fight against lakefront development wasn’t always popular, and some of his choices seem odd to us now. His prolonged legal battle against plans for the Field Museum cost him an untold sum, went all the way up to the Illinois Supreme Court and pushed the site off of Grant Park, south to what we now know as Museum Campus.

He did that to fight a museum. And we gave it away for rich folks’ views.

I leave you with Montgomery Ward’s words, quoted from Lois Wille’s book.

“Had I known in 1890 how long it would take me to preserve a park for the people against their will, I doubt if I would have undertaken it. I think there is not another man in Chicago who would have spent the money I have spent in this fight with certainty that even gratitude would be denied as interest.

“I fought for the poor people of Chicago, not the millionaires.”

See video of Lake Point Tower’s construction

Read about a corrupt deal I’ll never forgive myself for

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Her smile was weary — I got the sense it had been one of many long days in a row — but it was genuine as well. I recalled a line from Roald Dahl about only trusting people whose smiles went all the way to the eyes.

And she towed a little red Radio Flyer wagon behind her. I liked that too.

It was night on the north end of Navy Pier, across from the line of tourist attractions promising a fun faux Chicagoana with Ferris wheels and fat pizza and views from so far away that the city seems safe and kind.

On our side, it was just the bus terminal and a line of headlights. The audience of “The Tempest” production I wrote about last week waited to make their way to the roads and highways to take them home.

The woman with the little red wagon and the reflective yellow safety vest walked in front of the line of headlights, stopping momentarily to heave an orange road cone a little closer to the other three cones and the rumble strip that blocked off any new traffic trying to enter the Navy Pier lot.

Then she kept walking, towing her little red wagon behind her in a way that just made me have to ask.

“Because the cones and the strip are too heavy,” she said, smiling.

She was Navy Pier staff, of course. And the wagon wasn’t hers. The Radio Flyer was a convenience that had been bouncing around different departments for who knows how long.

“Guest services used to use it to haul their literature until they got a-”

She broke off the conversation here to yell friendly encouragement at a line of old lady Shakespeare fans sitting by the light.

“You’re OK to go, people!”

She turned back to me as the cars timidly sauntered past.

“Until they got a full cart. A dolly.”

She never stopped smiling that genuine, weary grin the whole time we talked or the whole time she directed traffic or the whole time she heaved and hauled road cones and a rumble strip at 10:10 on a weeknight using a children’s toy.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to explain how much I liked that, or her.

She turned back to the line of cars, directing her encouraging shouts to one old lady in the front who was attempting to drive out into the night with only her daytime running lights on.

“You might want to turn your lights on all the way!” she said, still smiling in the glow of headlights and a closing pier. “There you go!”

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Read about the “Tempest” production

Another stranger I liked

Of course I said yes.

So on Thursday, she of the dessert-first meals and I went to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “The Tempest” co-directed by Teller of Penn & Teller with a score by Tom Waits. (Sorry, Tom. Elvis Costello and David Bowie come first. If it helps, you beat Lou Reed.)

One of Navy Pier’s graces that still fails to save the place is a magnificent Shakespeare theater company. It’s a fully in-the-round performance space with exactly the same number of bad seats as there are cogent arguments that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays: zero.

I’m not a theater critic, just a Shakespeare buff who happens to blog and to admire circus aesthetic.

So of course I raved.

It was a breathtaking, brilliant production with a Prospero inspired by Dust Bowl sideshow magician “Willard the Wizard.” The acting and magical effects (Why has NO ONE ever interpreted Prospero’s magic as stage magic?) blended seamlessly with the carnie-punk tunes of Tom Waits, whom I’ve loved since my cousin Kate first told me in high school that “The Black Rider” was a thing.

There was magic, with all that connotes. Vague notions that the coin was in the other hand, that mirrors can explain all things and that the most important question you could be asked would be if this was your card.

Interspersed with Shakespeare, the result was, I groan to say it, but magic.

There was a moment — I won’t give it away because I want any reader of this to be as surprised, awed and humbled as I was — but the wizard Prospero’s daughter Miranda was levitating. It was the old trick, complete with air-sprite Ariel waving a hula hoop around the floater. I wondered absently how they did it.

Then I realized the trick.

She was floating because she was Miranda. And they were Ariel and Prospero.

And in this backroom off a pier I mock as a place tourists buy deep-dish that had somehow become a remote, spirit-laden island entrapping the dukes of Milan and Naples, there was nothing other that they could do than levitate beatifically while two goddesses sang gender-swapped versions of Tom Waits classics.

I know the actors were repeating a dead limey’s words with emphasis. I know the singers were vibrating their larynxes in alternating tonality and rhythm to hit that “Bone Machine” cadence.

Nothing would have changed about that moment had I known where every wire, rod and hook was located.

It was nothing so simple as “theater is magic.” Magic is magic. Theater is a bunch of people who would be atrocious buttonholers at parties mincing about (skillfully) to words someone else wrote.

But there is a magic in that even now, hours later, I can’t think of the man my playbill tells me is Larry Yando, three-year Scar of the “Lion King” touring company, as anyone other than Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan.

Nate Dendy’s not an actor and magician. He’s Ariel. I laughed when he silently, Teller-like, pre-show managed the audience with a deck of cards, a facial gesture and a bit of light pickpocketry. I winced at his pain encased in the old-timey magic stage prop replicating Sycorax’s cloven pine.

I broke a little when he asked his master if he was loved.

Although I’ve pledged not to spoil any of the surprises of the night, I’ll say this much: The theater was scattered with loose playing cards after the performance. I went back as blazer-clad ushers looked for stray playbills and sunglasses to see if I could claim one as a souvenir.

Amid collecting a flutter of ripped-up kings by a set of stairs leading up to the main stage, I saw it. One card lying face down on the thrust stage, the section of the performance that jutted into the audience to symbolize the island.

I asked a black-clad stagehand with an earpiece if I could have it.

“Knock yourself out,” he said, shrugging and walking away.

I leaned over into the stage and picked it up.

It was the ace of spades, meaning either that I had won a 1 in 52, that they only used the glamour cards or that one of the stars of “Bullshit!” and the crazy chicken inventor from “Mystery Men” had fated me for death.

The crew pulled back the proscenium, tearing away Prospero’s cave to reveal ladders, fly ropes, costumes hanging on hooks and other backstage paraphernalia. I turned the ace around in my fingers.

It was my card.

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A modern mage sells used magic

Drunken Shakespeare

I eat fruit in Thailand to a Tom Waits soundtrack — just trust me

Here’s part one of the fruit/Waits/Thailand combo

Seven unkind years later, I performed at this month’s Tuesday Funk

The scattered riders looked on the girl with approving, sad smiles and a bit of envy. The bus hadn’t moved in minutes, lodged in a gum wad of red brake lights in the dark. We were about 200 feet from our final destination.

We wanted to run free too, to scamper and skitter in a place promising to be as well-lit and safe as the aisle of a traffic-locked city bus.

So we went to Navy Pier.

I feel ashamed that I feel ashamed. I went there for a work gig of no import. Not pier-based WBEZ public radio, alas, but a solid job nonetheless.

But even as I walked to a place where people live, breathe, work and make quality public radio, I felt embarrassed to be there, like even a visit to this shiny, glittery, nonsense version of Chicago would be a betrayal of the Real City.

The gum wad eventually loosened, letting the bus lurch around a few curves to get to the depot area. We ambled out into a Saturday night at Navy Pier.

Dates were there, teenagers who found at least a decent substitutes from the bars they’ll hover at in a decade’s time. Some local-looking families, taking the kiddos for an age-appropriate night out to the Ferris wheel and kids museum.

Tourists, of course, wandering with heads flitting around between stores, tours and chain restaurants.

A young woman from either Bubba Gump’s or Harry Caray’s called out reservations for parties, one after the other, telling them their tables were ready. She rattled them off auctioneer-style, moving on to the next names the moment the prior didn’t show.

Middle-aged couples playing young guzzled mixed drinks from a neon-dangled Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville tucked by a McDonald’s. Slightly green-faced diners lumbered about with massive doggy bags filled with the remainder of the Giordano’s stuffed crust pizza they underestimated.

I’ve been to Freemont Street in Vegas, the Khao San in Bangkok. I’ve hit touristy strips from Grafton Street to Insadong Road, with South Beach and the Gaslamp in between.

There’s a certain fun to all of them, and a certain sameness. A certain look in the eyes of the people who work there, like they’re so so so chuffed to share their city with the enthusiasm tourist trade demand, but with occasional dead-eyed glares at the clock when they think no one can see.

Here there are bright lights and a palpable security presence. Here there are T-shirts and hats that say the name of the place they’re sold loudly on the front, the country where they were made hidden on the tag. Here there are comestibles culturally relegated to a particular area, so you can say, “Why yes, I did have [deep dish in Chicago/tom yung goong in Bangkok/a Guinness in Dublin]. And I got a T-shirt too!”

“Everybody hates a tourist,” the band Pulp sang in the ‘90s, “especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh.”

I am as disappointed and angry with these people as they are at me when I come to their town. I want to take them for tacos at La Pasadita, sandwiches at Mr. Beef, slap that Giordano’s crap out of their hands and put in a slice of Pequod’s.

Or, better yet, not stuffed crust pizza because it’s gimmicky and overrated. I’ll put ketchup on my hot dogs if I want to too.

I want to show them the murals in Pilsen, the beach in Calumet Park. I want to send them honky-tonk dancing at Carol’s or just wandering by the lagoon at Humboldt Park.

But I don’t have kids who gape at bright lights and spinning Ferris wheels. I’m not a bored teen looking for a booze-free place to hang. I’m not a business traveler airlifted overnight into a city only known from Ferris Bueller. If this is in fact the extent of their exploration ambition, if this isn’t an embarrassing side note to an otherwise fascinating excursion into the hidden corners of Chicago, I can’t really fault them.

I’ve been to Freemont Street and the Khao San, the Gaslamp and Insadong. And on a packed Saturday night, I’ve also been to Navy Pier.

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A prior trip to Navy Pier

Another view of a tourist area