I forgot to “Save Ferris”
Last night I ordered in a pizza and watched three back-to-back episodes of that reality show about the real housewives of Orange County and played on the internet for entirely too long. Only this morning did I realize that I was SUPPOSED to be sitting out under the stars watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off! This is about the fifth movie I’ve really wanted to see in the Outdoor Film Festival and the fifth one that I’ve forgotten about. Anyone see the show last night?
Save Ferris was a pretty fun band.
The band was good, I’ll second that! I had the movie penciled in but have to think it was pretty darn wet out there after raining for two straight days.
Oh, good point about the wet grass. I will totally use that to console myself.
I was there.
I walked to Butler Field from my place of employment at the Tribune Tower around 5:30pm. The light drizzle surely was not going to stop me from enjoying the last downtown movies in the park. I jumped into the Walgreens across from Millennium park to pick up a couple ponchos. The rain had stopped after leaving Walgreens. Hooray!
As I approached the home of downtown Movies in the Park at Butler Field, there was a good amount of people there. The grass was soaked. There was plenty of seating up close to the front, but the choices were either muddy grass or muddy dirt.
I put my blanket and chair down on the least muddy grass I could find lining up center with the screen. People from Macy’s were handing out plastic stadium seat cushions. They gladly gave people however many amount you wanted. A couple dudes had about 30 seat cushions that they used to cover their entire blanket. This lady in front of me with three 15-foot by 30-foot tarps took two big boxes of seat cushions!
As my blanket on the ground started to get more and more wet, I wished I brought a tarp with me. I thought, “Man, those people with tarps are smart.”
After about 15 minutes, it started to drizzle. I popped up my umbrella, threw on the poncho, sat in my chair and read the TimeOut magazine that was handed out. A party of 15 people came to the big tarp during the drizzle and they gladly took seat cushions from the box and sat down in the drizzle. It was surprising that just three people from that group brought an umbrella.
I sat on my chair and was entertained by what people did as the drizzle turned to rain. Then the brillliant tarps ended up becoming water collection devices as they collected puddles. When you arrive, the tarps function very well from keeping your butt dry from the water on the ground. But they also function the other way. They are very good at keeping the water from the sky from getting into the ground. I thought, “Man, those people with tarps are dumb.”
The 15 people took two of the three tarps and shook the water off. Here’s a photo of them in the progress of doing this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16706861@N00/228830391/
Then they all gathered onto one tarp, and pulled the other two tarps on top of themselves forming a canopy. They were packed in very tight into one blue blob. With sheer ingeniusity they used the few umbrellas they had as devices to hold the tarp over their head. “Man, those people with tarps are smart.”
I continued to sit in my chair with umbrella overhead. I tried to move as little as possible to not allow the puddles collecting on my umbrella to fall off.
It was like being a kid at the barber shop. They put that big poncho sheet over you to collect your hair. Only now it was water being collected onto my poncho.sheet. If I moved as much as an inch, the puddles would spread and fall down.
Very few people actually left. It was now a battle. We weren’t going to let the rain defeat us from Movies in the Park. OH NO! WE ARE HOLDING ON FOR DEAR LIFE!
Then my girlfriend Lisa calls as she was driving in from the suburbs to see the movie with me. So I left my nice dry chair, placed the TimeOut magazine to keep the seat dry, and hopped into her car to park in the Tribune Tower lot (employee ID with employee present are required to enter the lot east of the Tower)
After parking we walked back to Butler Field with her chair. It was only drizzling by this point. When we got back to my blanket 15 minutes before the start of the movie, my chair had a huge puddle with the TimeOut magazine soaking in the middle of it. “Guess that didn’t keep it dry.”
We sat down and literally two minutes before the movie started, the rain stopped. Umbrellas came down and the movie started. YES!
It was really cool seeing all the Chicago scenes in the movie while sitting right downtown. In fact there was one aerial shot in the movie that actually showed Butler Field. “Look! That’s where we are right now!” The parade scene where every goes crazy in the Loop gave me the chills. The ending after the credits was hilarious where Ferris asks us, “Why are you still here? Go home. C’mon now, go home!” It was like, no we are soaking wet, we ain’t goin’ home!
wow. your site allows for very long comments. :-)