Physical State of Matt #34: ILLINOIS
- 50statesofmatt
- 1 hour ago
- 28 min read
I was now two thirds of the way through the trip. My whole modus operandi was winging it - plan as little as possible and see what happened. What few plans I did make, I mostly stuck to. There was a rough framework for Illinois - pop in to quickly see my friend Sarah, then my friends Doug & Lindsay, then spend the week in Springfield. It didn’t turn out that way at all.
LAKE VILLA
My first stop was in Lake Villa to see Sarah. I met Sarah through Chris, my close friend, collaborator, former roommate, and all around homie. I met Chris while studying abroad in Melbourne. He was getting his degree at the University of Illinois and I was at USC. We shot and edited a “Study Abroad Experience” video together and had an absolute blast. I told him he should move to LA after graduation to work on film and TV with me, and remarkably he did. We were roomies for 5 years and worked on a number of productions together including That’s So Raven and I Love Your Work.
Sarah grew up with Chris in Lindenhurst, Illinois - the Chicago ‘burbs. She came to visit us in LA a couple times, and later when she moved to San Diego, we all hung out a few times more. The first time I went to ComicCon I stayed with her.
She had long ago moved back to Illinois and gotten married. I hadn’t seen her since Chris’ bachelor party over ten years earlier.
With the assistance of Chris’ fiancee, Faleshia, I had secretly freed up his schedule. Brad (see MASSACHUSETTS) and I knocked on his door first thing in the morning, Flo handed him a suitcase she'd packed on the sly, and we drove to the airport for flights to Chicago while he was still trying to figure out what the hell was happening. We met our friend Alex at the hotel, who I’d convinced to fly in from Switzerland.
The big highlight of the trip was watching a pro hockey game (Blackhawks vs Penguins) outdoors at a football stadium - in ten degree weather and a blizzard. Ah, Chicago in February - good times.
Anyway, Sarah and her husband met us out for a drink on that trip, and that was the last time I’d seen her. The plan was to meet her for lunch then keep driving. It was like no time had passed as we caught each other up on our lives over the last decade.
She, like I, had recently gotten a divorce. She’d moved into an old house she bought from the family when her grandmother passed and had been updating it project by project. After lunch she offered me the guest room for the night. Her bar bocce league had their championship that evening at a bizarre Polish bar.
I’d only ever heard of two kinds of people who played bocce - 1) kids at outdoor summer parties 2) dapper old Italian gentlemen. Bar league bocce? Strange Polish bar? How could I refuse?
The roots of bocce go back seven thousand years to Egypt. Well, there is evidence of people playing games that involved throwing balls at each other. Was it bocce? Who the hell knows, but we’ll go with that. It later spread to Ancient Rome and Greece, where the rules were roughly the same as today. Similar in concept to curling, two teams take turns rolling differently colored balls at a smaller target ball, the pallino. Whoever has the closest ball at the end of the round scores points. Simple.
Bocce was brought to the US by Italian immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The first public courts in New York City were installed by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1934. In the early 2000s a few friends in Washington DC, presumably looking for more games you can play while mildly inebriated, started bar bocce leagues. Its new popularity with a younger generation led to the formation of the professional World Bocce League in 2011. Paging ESPN 8 "The Ocho".
The Log Cabin Bar in Des Plains looked as if a hoarder's attic threw up in an antique store and they dropped a bar in the middle of the mess. Old tools, license plates, antique Singer sewing machines, taxidermy, kitchen implements, jars full of hardware, koi pond - the place had it all.
I was entertained just wandering through the place. The longer I looked, the more randomness I spotted. Every other conversation I overhead from patrons huddled over their tables was in Polish.
In the back, a large area had been set up as four dirt bocce courts, and there were a lot of people playing! The league finals played on two lanes while a short sudden death tournament played on the other two.
Watching was fun, but it really made me want to jump in and play. Forty minutes in, it started to rain so everyone rushed inside to wait out the storm. It was quickly evident that the rain was only getting harder. The rest of the championship was rescheduled for the following week.
There was one thing I’d really been hoping to do in Chicago, but I hadn’t planned ahead to make it happen. I wanted to have dinner at Alinea. It was the first tasting menu I’d ever eaten and I fondly remembered it as the best meal I’d ever had. Now that I’d had the privilege of experiencing a few more, I was curious to see if it was really as good as I remembered.
The problem was that there was no availability for a solo diner for a month, though there was miraculously a spot for two people that Saturday night. Over lunch I asked Sarah if she was the type of person who would ever treat herself to a wildly extravagant dinner. To my surprise and delight she said she was. She checked with her boyfriend to make sure it wasn’t something he would want to do with her together. It wasn’t, so we booked it - game on! I extended my stay in Lake Villa a couple more nights.
I explored while Sarah worked. I drove by Chris’ childhood home in Lindenhurst and took a picture for him from the curb. It hadn't changed a bit.
I then went to the Gurnee Mills mall. You may be thinking that a mall is an odd place for me to visit, and I would agree. But knowing Chris for 25 years, I heard the same conversation a thousand times:
Chris: I’m from the Chicago area
Rando: Oh yeah, where?
Chris: Lindenhurst
Rando: Never heard it
Chris: It’s near Gurnee Mills
Rando: Oh yeah! Totally, I know where that is
I had to see this mall of wide repute. And you know what? It was larger than most, but still just a mall. It had been years since I’d been in one, and I have to say - they still suck but rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated. Sure, it’s nowhere near their heyday in the 80’s and 90’s, but prevailing wisdom was that COVID would kill them. Prognosticators forgot that it’s Americans’ inalienable right to shop and eat in shitty food courts. I'm pretty sure that’s in the Constitution somewhere.
That night Sarah and I met up with her friend Jenny and went to that staple of Midwest culture - the Friday fish fry. The tradition was introduced to the region in the 1800s by German and Polish Catholic immigrants. In addition to lent, Catholics traditionally abstain from eating meat from warm-blooded animals on Fridays to honor Christ on the day of the week he was crucified, or to signify the sixth day when god created land animals, or whatever. Popularity in the US grew in the 1940s and 1950s when it was adopted as a staple of supper clubs (see WISCONSIN).
This fish used is a flaky whitefish - usually haddock or cod. At Fairmont Shores, where we ate, they use Alaskan Pollock and we were given the choice of beer battered or cornmeal fried. The battered preparation was nearly identical to British fish & chips. As is tradition, it was All-You-Can-Eat, but the portions were such that it would take a true glutton to need more than the one serving. As we ate, a summer storm blew over Fox Lake just outside our window.
After dinner, we drove to nearby Wolff's Tavern, a local legendary dive bar and a favorite of Sarah & her friends in their early 20s. On the way, a car pulled alongside us and started honking. It was Sarah’s mom Andy. She followed us to the bar and joined us.
Wolff’s Tavern rests on the shore of Sand Lake in a converted house and has everything you want in a good dive bar - dim lighting, eclectic decor, sarcastic bartenders, friendly regulars, and cheap drinks in plastic cups. As I had been ordered by Liz (see TENNESSEE), I ordered a Chicago Handshake - a shot of malort with an Old Style back.
Malort, or technically malört, is a point of pride and right of passage for Chicagoans. It’s been the subject of viral TikTok trends and is used regularly to haze tourists. Its flavor has been described as…well, I'll let the quotes speak for themselves.
“What does a punch in the face taste like? Just try Malort.” - Kat Odell, Eater
“Malort tastes like fertilizer, but it doesn’t grow on you.” - The “Wall of Malort” at Nisei Lounge
“It takes like pencil shavings and heartbreak.” - John Hodgman
“It’s like swallowing a burnt condom full of gas.” - Jason Sudeikis’ character, Gene, in “Drinking Buddies”
“Malort tastes like a baby aspirin wrapped in a grapefruit peel, bound in rubberbands, and then soaked in well gin.” - Sam Mechling - the actual Marketing Director for Jeppson’s Malört
Those and many more gems at Chicago Magazine
It’s a wormwood schnapps brought to the US in the 1920s by Swedish immigrant Carl Jeppson. Its sale was allowed during prohibition because it was labeled as “medicinal alcohol”. It tasted so bad, who would want to drink it for pleasure? So, with much build up, I “malorted”.
It has a deeply, deeply bitter herbal flavor that really lingers. It’s unpleasant and I’m not likely to order it again by choice, but I didn't hate it. I’ve had Gammel Dansk (Denmark’s equivalent) and will occasionally drank little bottles of Underberg in one go. Herbal doesn’t bother me. I get why people hate it, but I drank snake pisco in PERU - you’ve got to do better than wormwood to gross me out.
Outside of the tavern the rain had stopped, but wild clouds still roiled overhead, borne on the gale. The dwindling light made the sky look like something out of Ghostbusters. I could have easily stayed at Wolff’s all night, but us “mature adults” called it a night after an hour or so.
ALINEA
I’d never heard of Alinea before I had a reservation there. I was the head of sales at a small software company and we had a large agency client in Chicago. They were giving us a substantial chunk of money each month and had been very vocal about the features they needed us to add to the platform.
We’d been stringing them along for well over a year, assuring them their features were on the roadmap and we estimated them to be ready by such and such month. We didn’t do this to manipulate them, we truly planned to develop those features. The problem was that our CEO had the habit of constantly changing the roadmap based on whatever he was excited about at the moment. The features they needed were very useful but not fun or sexy, so they kept getting pushed.
Months went by, deadlines were missed, over and over again - and all the while they paid without complaint. Finally it had gone past ridiculous and I needed to do damage control. Where could we take them to dinner, I asked - anywhere they wanted. Their answer was Alinea. I had to battle the COO to approve the expense, but I got my way. Three of us flew to Chicago for dinner.
I did some research on the restaurant and watched the episode of Chef’s Table about it. That show is the absolute pinnacle of food porn. I highly recommend this episode, or any episode really.
The word alinea is based on the Latin “a linea” meaning from the line. In French the term is used in writing to signify a new paragraph or the start of a new thought. Its symbol is called a pilcrow and looks like a backward P with two lines ¶.
Executive Chef Grant Achatz selected the name and logo to represent a new line of thought in cuisine. A little pretentious? Perhaps, but he delivered by zealously attacking the goal of redefining what food could be - sometimes avant garde, sometimes whimsical, but always interesting.
They were pioneers in what's called molecular gastronomy. The term wasn't because the portions were so small - they leaned into creative new things they could to food with science to change things up. The results speak for themselves. Alinea held three Michelin stars from 2010 through 2024 and in its heyday was voted "Best Restaurant in America” for several years.
Chef Achatz is a celebrity in foodie circles, but you won’t see him hosting a show on the Food Network. He’s a soft spoken guy who lets his work do the talking. He did however have a small cameo as himself in The Bear season 3 finale. Unexpectedly, the thing he’s best known for is his battle with cancer.
He opened Alinea in 2005 when he was a 28-year-old rising star. The restaurant won instant acclaim and was booked months out. Two years after opening he was bothered by a persistent sore on his tongue and finally had it checked out. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Doctors told him the only chance he had to live was with an aggressive treatment plan that included removing most of his tongue.
Unsurprisingly he got second, third, fortieth opinions. He finally found a group of doctors at the University of Chicago with an experimental new treatment that, if successful, would let him keep his tongue. He went for it, and began aggressive radiation treatment and chemotherapy, working at the restaurant throughout the process. If you’ve never worked food service and experienced the physical toll it takes on a healthy body, understand that’s an astounding feat.
Then, a month after starting treatment, Achatz lost his sense of taste - just gone. And no one could promise him it would ever come back. How do you experiment and design a cutting edge menu without being able to taste? He and his chefs developed a scale of flavor profiles so he could verbally describe what he was looking for and they could create it accurately. So much sweetness, so much acidity, etc.
He went public with the news, knowing it would get out anyway. And still, the restaurant flourished. He beat the cancer and his sense of taste returned after 18 months. He credits the experience with amplifying his passion for cooking and making him a better chef.
Sarah and I got dressed up on Saturday afternoon. Thankfully I’d brought a blazer on this trip, but I felt rather underdressed in jeans. So that we could indulge in the wine pairing and avoid the hellish traffic, we took the train into the city.
Everything was chill for a few stops, then it all went pear shaped. At one stop, without warning, 300 college-aged kids dressed in western wear piled onto the train carrying beers. They were heading into the city for the Windy City Smokeout barbecue and country music festival, which attracts about 20,000 people each year.
The train was so full of incessantly talking brats that they had to shout to hear each other, which made them shout louder to hear each other over the shouting - and so on into dangerous decibel levels. Our timing was too tight to get off and catch the next train and an Uber would have taken even longer. We were hostages at a frat party on rails.
It reminded me of an experience I had at USC when I was driving for Campus Cruisers, a free taxi service to get students to and from campus. I had two simultaneous dispatches - a Chinese international student going to the library and three sorority girls going somewhere. Turned out it was the bar, which was technically against the rules, but whatever.
I had my first pickup sit in the front, then got the girls. The four (not three) of them jammed on top of each other in the back and proceeded to talk excitedly at each other without pause. I dropped them off first. My passenger and I sat there as silence came crashing back in. After a long moment he turned to me slowly and said thoughtfully “One girl is as loud as five hundred ducks.” I'll never forget that.
So there we were on a train with 150,000 ducks. Conversation was impossible so I played a game on my phone, grinding my teeth and trying to block them out. I reminded myself that I also had regularly been a public nuisance in my teenage punk rock days. But that did nothing to stop me from wanting to grab each and every one of those entitled shit stains by the neck and squeeze until their puny brains oozed out of their nostrils like toothpaste.
Apart from testing my last nerve, members of this unruly mob got off at each stop to change cars so they could talk at different friends, causing small delays each time. When Sarah and I finally got to our stop we realized that all of those small delays had added up to a pretty big one. We were running late and frantically called an Uber.
Alinea has two dining experiences. The Salon, upstairs where I’d taken my clients, operates like a traditional restaurant. Book a time, show up and eat. They then turn the table for the next party. Sarah and I had managed to snag spots downstairs in the Gallery. The Gallery has two fixed seatings at 5:00 and 9:00, only accommodating parties of two or four for a total of no more than 16 people. It’s a precisely orchestrated experience rolled out simultaneously for all guests. Showing up late fucks it up for everyone - it’s not good.
After what felt like an eternity, we were dropped off at the nondescript building with only the Alinea logo on the outside. We rushed to the host desk and were immediately escorted down a dark and moody hall into a room with a single large table and only two empty seats. We were five minutes late and everyone had been waiting for us. Ugh
Within seconds of sitting, the lights dimmed and heavy percussive music began to play. A line of a dozen servers marched in, theatrically lit braziers that were hanging above the table, and began roasting skewers of meat on the open flames. We were completely whiplashed transitioning from the stressful Uber to this in less than two minutes. It was immediately clear - this was more than dinner. It was music, dance, art, and food - a performance for all the senses.
I’m going to share highlights of the experience, not describe the food too much. Throw a rock and you’ll hit a self-proclaimed food critic who has described Alinea’s food in great detail. Also, I think that taking pictures of your food at restaurants is kinda gauche. Sure, I'm a hypocrite and do it some (see above), but as a rule I try not to. For the foodies among you, here's a photo of the menu they sent us home with:
As a snarky aside, I actually can't stand that term anymore. I deride the fart-sniffing pig show "foodie culture"has become. I recommend the midnight-dark comedy film The Menu. It’s a biting satire of foodie culture and is (forgive me) chef’s kiss.
After our first course we were instructed to stand and follow a server into the kitchen. It was like no other kitchen I had ever seen: calm, quiet, pristinely scrubbed - a well oiled machine.
Having worked in professional kitchens during my teens and early 20s, I relate more to how Anthony Bourdain described his early years in “Kitchen Confidential”. He said that being an executive chef fulfilled “the child’s dream of running one’s own pirate crew”, ruling over “radical underlings with very counter-culture lifestyles.”
We were lined up at a long stainless steel counter and served a paella-like dish with an original cocktail. We were in there for perhaps five minutes and all the while Chef Achatz stood thirty feet away calmly directing a cadre of spotless food ninjas. I shudder to think what I would have done if 16 members of the general public had been paraded through any kitchen I ever worked in - let alone what they would have thought.
We were then shepherded back to our private dining room just outside the kitchen, but it had changed. The large table was now a collection of individual tables for parties. The lighting was different, the music was different. Hell, they’d even swapped the art on the walls. Reeling, Sarah muttered “Woah, they Willy Wonka’d our asses.”
Something insane like 20 courses followed and each one was special in its own way. Many of them were paired with fine wines, the provenance of which were explained in great detail. They were delicious, but honestly I barely understood what I was told about them at the time, let alone remember any of them now. I always get the wine pairing with tasting menus. It adds to the experience and it’s fun to smile and nod thoughtfully at some sommelier’s esoteric lessons like I speak wine.
Some of the more memorable courses were the “Chicago Style Hot Dog” and the “Fossilized Tamale Bone”.
With the first they had managed to perfectly distill the taste of this local classic into a single small bite. The hot dog was a square of crystal clear gelatin adorned with perfectly geometric bits of onion, tomato, and jalapeno, then eye dropper dots of spicy mustard and liquified neon green relish. A critic could say they served us hot dog water jello and called it haute cuisine - and my cynical side would have agreed, until I tasted it. The flavors were bright and the ratios were perfect. It tasted like a Chicago-style hot dog - exactly.
The “Fossilized Tamale Bone” was actually four separate elements in one dish. First, was the expertly seasoned roasted marrow served in a cross section bone. Second was a stone-colored empanada cooked directly on a piece of slate. Third was a small tamale, its husk roasted over an ornate burner at our table. And finally, there was the prawn, roasted with the head on.
The server brought us a tray with assorted tools - brushes, tweezers, etc and a small box full of gray seasoned bread crumbs. We were instructed to make like archaeologists and use the tools to excavate the prawns, which were buried in the “dirt”. Genre-defying, fun, ridiculous, and super duper yummy. With sparkling descriptors like that, perhaps I too could be an Internet "food critic".
Dessert was two Alinea classics - both of which you can learn about in the Chef’s Table episode. I’m amazed we had any room to eat anything else, but the many courses were portioned just right and spaced over three and a half hours. We were full, but hadn’t filled those extra dessert pockets in our stomachs.
Their green apple balloon is a freak of science. They figured out how to work sugar in just the right way so they can fill it with helium and it will hold together. The string is made of apple leather. We were instructed the best way to eat it was to put our mouths on it and suck the helium out, then pop the smooshed balloon in. The woman at the next table had poor form and got the balloon stuck in her hair. The servers whisked it away and immediately had a warm wet towel and new balloon for her. It was almost like they’d done this before.
The final course was “Paint”, and what a show it was. We were moved next to each other on the booth side of the table. A large piece of black plexiglass was placed on the table, the lights dimmed, and music started. A string of servers and chefs paraded around the room creating abstract art on the plexi at each of the tables.
It was a blueberry granola chocolate meringue cake sparkle cream mess. The final touch was when the chef, with an elaborate flourish, shattered the meringue with the back of his spoon. Although a little challenging to pick up with silverware, it tasted divine.
So, brass tacks - was it worth it? I admit I felt a little guilty spending so much on a single meal, but people regularly spend that much on concerts and sporting events. I got a three and a half hour show from someone in the very upper echelon of their field. This was my NFL Game, my Taylor Swift Eras concert. So hell yeah, it was absolutely worth it. Would I recommend it? In a heartbeat, to the right person. Would I do it a third time? Depends who’s paying.
Was it as good as I remembered? It’s a difficult comparison because the Salon and Gallery are so fundamentally different. The performance in the Gallery was as big a part of the experience as the food. The entire experience was absolutely epic. The dishes were probably as good or better than the first time, but with more experience I was a little less floored by them.
And I noticed tiny imperfections this time. I feel like Homer Simpson nitpicking the Mona Lisa, but I noticed them. The chair upholstery was just a little worn at the corners. The servers’ shirts weren’t perfectly crisp and white. There were a handful of them, very, very subtle, but there. And it matters at that level. The desserts are the same signature dishes they've been serving for years. I get it, it’s what they’re known for and they’re crowd pleasers. People would be upset if they got rid of them, but still. If you're still going to be a "new line of thought" you've got to kill your darlings from time to time.
Grant Achatz rocked fine dining with his innovation twenty years ago and influenced thousands of chefs that came after. Now, in 2026 Alinea's radical approach doesn't stand out the way it once did. Still unequivocally incredible, but no longer unique. These little things possibly contributed to Alinea losing one of its Michelin stars late last year.
Still, over two decades in the fickle world of haute cuisine is a massive accomplishment, and Alinea is still going strong. But here I am talking shit like one of those self-proclaimed expert "foodies" I hate so much. What the hell do I know?
I posted the pictures of me and Sarah the server took on Instagram and Julie, my former colleague who had attended the first dinner, pointed out that I’d coincidentally eaten there 7 years to the day after that first trip.
Sated, Sarah and I emerged from the dark restaurant into the summer evening sun. To return our overwhelmed senses to the real world, and to make sure we didn’t get too full of ourselves after such a decadent dinner, we walked a few blocks for Old Styles at a local bar and FaceTimed Chris.
GLEN ELLYN
I bid farewell to Sarah and drove a short way south, staying within the extended suburbs of Chicago. I was going to visit friends from college, Doug & Lindsay.
When I was in my teens, I’d never had any interest in living in Los Angeles. In fact, the notion hadn’t even crossed my mind. I limped over the finish line of high school and got my diploma at 18, right on schedule. This in itself was a small miracle considering I’d only achieved a quarter credit my freshman year - for gym of all things.
At 18, I'd had an assfull of school. I had been mentally checked out for all four years, but managed to sneak through because I was a smart enough bullshitter to get low C’s without letting little things like homework interfere with my drinking time.
I’d already been working for two years full time in restaurants and living on my own for over a year. As far as I was concerned I’d done my scholarly duty and I was done. I had become such a rebellious derelict in high school that my mom, who’d once had such high academic aspirations for me, was relieved I’d gotten my diploma.
I continued cooking and was making enough to cover my rent, food, gas, smokes, and bar tabs (I passed for 21 early on). I didn’t aspire to much else. But after a couple of years doing this, it dawned on me that future opportunities were limited if I stayed cooking in Ithaca. At 19 my roommate & coworker, Will, and I decided to move to New Orleans and work in restaurants there. I learned quickly that making yourself indispensable and threatening to quit was the fastest way to get a raise. We took the raise and stayed.
I decided to go back to school so that I had more options. I started attending the local community college. I had no vision for the future so I studied business, figuring everything was business when you got down to it. TCCC wasn’t any more difficult than high school and I was studying by choice for the first time, so I got straight A’s while continuing to work. After a year, I figured why not get a 4-year degree before I got too entrenched in working that I couldn’t take a break.
I always loved film. I rented as many movies as I could on VHS and wore a hole through my copy of Aliens. Will and I would always close the kitchen as quickly we could on Fridays to make it to the last showing of the day at the local theater. We’d see whatever had just come out - even if it was garbage.
It occurred to me as I was looking at colleges that moving to a big city and working in film didn’t have to just be something that other people did - I could too. It had literally never occurred to me as a possibility. I applied to Boston University because Boston was the beating heart of the East Coast ska scene in the mid-90s.
I also applied to SUNY Binghamton as my safety school, and for shits and giggles submitted applications at NYU and USC. Much to my surprise, NYU waitlisted me and USC admitted me. I learned later that transferring in with high grades from a community college in the spring semester had really helped my chances.
I’d been to the city (NYC) a bunch of times and had a sense of what that experience would be like, but I’d never been to LA. I learned that Zoe, a childhood friend of mine, had just completed an MFA at USC and was working as a sound designer. I arranged a three day visit over Halloween weekend.
She had an apartment on Hollywood Blvd. just a few blocks west of La Brea, where the Walk of Fame starts. On Friday she toured me around campus and introduced me to her classmates. She took me around the Universal backlot and introduced me to the Music Video exec she’d been interning for. We visited a film set then snuck into the theme park through a back gate. It was all so exciting and overwhelming. Each day was 85 and sunny which, coming from a place that gets precipitation 160 days a year, was a big deal.
On Saturday night we went to a Halloween warehouse rave in a sketchy abandoned area of downtown. I’d never seen anything like this. The people there were so cool and beautiful. Their costumes were elaborate with fine attention to detail. One girl I still remember had bright orange hair and was dressed as Leeloo from The Fifth Element.
I flew back to Ithaca on Sunday, accepted admission to USC and started making plans. I had applied as a business major since I wanted to keep my credits, and the idea of making a living in movies still felt like a pipe dream. I had applied as a Cinema minor though.
The first week of January 1998, my roommate Josh and I piled into my old Nissan Sentra and drove to LA. Four days later I picked up my key at the Student Housing office and unloaded my car into J586, a two-bedroom apartment in Cardinal Gardens across the street from campus.
I met Bryan and Brian, my roommates for the semester. The prior semester they had lived there with their friend Doug and a guy named Hendy. Hendy didn’t return for the spring semester and Doug left for a semester in Prague so by a stroke of luck I had a bedroom to myself. Doug was also studying film, so I was dubbed “New Doug”. Therefore Doug loomed large as a mythical figure my first several months in LA.
Bryan, Doug, and many of the people I made friends with were part of the USC Marching Band. Brian was a senior member of The Trojan Knights, a spirit organization. So I was quickly indoctrinated into the world of rabid college sports fandom. Our apartment was a main gathering place for our friend group, including Liz (see TENNESSEE), and we still refer to ourselves collectively as J586 to this day.
Zoe had passed her internship at Universal to me, so I spent two days a week on the lot and regularly worked on music video shoots on the weekend. I didn’t have time for a lot of the extracurricular “college experience” activities, but I got to go to all the band and Trojan Knights parties without being a member. It didn’t hurt that I was one of the few people old enough to buy beer.
At the end of the semester I moved off campus and Doug returned from Prague. As a fellow J586er and film buff, he and I got to know each other well over the next few years. He started dating Lindsay, one of the USC Song Girls, shortly after.
Everything was surreal. Not only was I working in film, but many of my friends performed in person before tens of thousands of people and millions of people on TV for football games. Our stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, sat more than three times the population of Ithaca.
USC football kept the J586ers in regular contact in the years following graduation. During one of my many career and life transitions, Doug and Lindsay graciously allowed me to stay with them at their house in Eagle Rock for a while as I got resettled. Doug and Lindsay got married and were the first in our friend group to have kids. I met their son Jack at tailgates.
Tailgating became less of a priority as people had families and got busy with their careers. And, because I am absolute shit at staying in touch with people, more and more time passed between the times we all saw each other. Doug and Lindsay moved back to the Chicago area. The last time I’d seen them was at Brian's wedding a handful of years prior.
I stopped to see Doug in Downers Grove at the restaurant he was managing. We caught up over lunch between typical daily restaurant crises. I made plans to meet at their house in Glen Ellyn for dinner and to stay with them for the night. Doug recommended that I spend the afternoon at the Morton Arboretum.
The Morton Arboretum was established in 1922 by Joy Morton, founder of the Morton Salt Company - you know, back in the day when incredibly rich people applied some of their wealth and power to projects that enriched the lives of the public. It covers 1,700 acres that include a section of restored tallgrass prairie, 4,100 different living plant species, the Center for Tree Science, and a catalog of over 200,000 plants.
I spent the sunny afternoon walking the miles of paths, in gardens, around ponds, and through groves of different trees. There was a fun art installation on display called Vivid Creatures - five giant sculptures of native animals dotted around the grounds, painted in striking colors.
That night for dinner, Lindsay cooked amazing pork chops and mashed potatoes. I met their daughter Noelle, a sophmore at the University of Oregon, who was home for the summer. Noelle was nice, but completely uninterested in getting to know mom and dad's college buddy.
Doug, Lindsay, and I caught up on all of our life changes, career changes, etc. We discussed my trip and Lindsay gave me a bunch of recommendations for Texas, where she is originally from. I stayed the night in Jack’s room, who was away pursuing music at the University of Miami. It was great to see them.
I’m someone who was never interested in having kids, and I’m only more certain of that the older I get. It’s probably a strange thing to say at my age, but I still just cannot fathom what that experience is like and a part of me is still stuck processing that most of my friends have them.
Doug and Lindsay being empty nesters was a bit of a shock, though of course the math checks out. My clock never ticked once. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I do find it interesting being in the vast minority among my generation uninterested in this thing that is such a big part of the human experience.
SPRINGFIELD
The following morning I drove south to Springfield. The whole reason I’d chosen Springfield in the first place was because Julie, who I’d met in the stands at the College World Series in NEBRASKA, recommended it. And that’s as much reason as I needed. She said I had to visit the Lincoln Tomb and look into the plot to steal his remains. I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t spent the week in Springfield, but everyone in Illinois I had shared my plans with made a distasteful face and asked “why”?
Also, although I hadn’t been in Chicago proper except for my trip to Alinea, it broke my rule by being the Obvious Place in Illinois. But my trip, my rules, and I’ll break them if I want to. Besides, it wouldn’t feel like my trip if I didn’t break the rules sometimes. I did still have a chance though, to swing through Springfield and visit the tomb.
In 1876, only 11 years after he was killed, an Irish Chicago crime boss hatched a plan to steal and ransom Lincoln’s body. The whole scheme played out like a Hollywood movie and I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into one, though there have been a couple of books and a History Channel documentary film “Stealing Lincoln’s Body” in 2009.
Jame “Big Jim” Kinealy planned to steal Lincoln's remains from his tomb and hide them over 200 miles away in the Indiana sand dunes, now a National Park. He would then demand $200,000 ($5.5 Million in today’s money), and the release of Benjamin Boyd from Joliet Penitentiary. Boyd was a talented forger Big Jim depended on for his illicit businesses.
Kinealy sent two of his men, Terrence Mullen and Jack Hughes, to execute the grave robbery. They brought a third man, Lewis Swegles. Little did they know their man Lewis was an informant for the Secret Service, an agency that had been formed only 10 years prior to combat counterfeiting.
Upon hearing the news, the Secret Service collaborated with local police and the Pinkerton Detective Agency on a sting to catch them in the act. The thieves executed their plan on November 7th - election day - figuring it would give them a distraction. The trio entered the tomb, opened the sarcophagus, and withdrew the coffin. They then sent Swegles to get the horse and cart they’d brought to transport the body.
With their inside man away, law enforcement moved in, but the thieves weren't inside. They hadn’t seen that Mullen and Hughes had left the tomb to await the cart under a nearby tree. When they saw the agents rush the tomb, they hid.
A search of the cemetery commenced, and in the dark one of the secret service agents accidentally discharged his gun. A firefight ensued between the Pinkertons and the Secret Service, and in the confusion the thieves escaped.
Ten days later, proving most criminals’ downfall is their own stupidity, Mullen and Hughes were apprehended in the same bar where they’d told Swegles about the heist. Lincoln’s body still resides in his tomb, but it’s now in a steel cage.
The tomb is an imposing building with a towering obelisk in the middle of the sprawling Oak Ridge Cemetery.
A plaque of the Gettysburg address hangs over the entrance and several statues peer down from a curved balcony. A three-foot-tall bronze bust sits out front. It’s immediately obvious which of its prominent features is touched by visitors the most.
Inside the tomb, a small replica of the statue from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC greets guests in a curved lobby. A circular path leads out of this room on the right side and works its way around to the left, passing by smaller sculptures of Lincoln from different eras of his life - young man, student, lawyer, president. On the far side of the building, the path passes by the current sarcophagus.
The original sarcophagus (without his body) was put in front of the tomb during the reconstruction of the tomb in 1930, where it was smashed by vandals and souvenir seekers. Fragments were discovered years later, and one of them is displayed in the hallway.
It’s a funny thing, but when I see pictures or statues of Abraham Lincoln, the first thing I think of isn’t our 16th President, it’s not the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s not his assassination. I think of my dad. When I was growing up my dad always went all out for Halloween. He would grow out his hair and beard all year, then use them as part of his costume for Halloween. I thought Abraham Lincoln was the best costume he ever did - he was a spitting image. It's the schnoz.
As I turned Pierogi out of Oak Ridge Cemetary, I reflected on how good it had been to see Sarah, Doug, and Lindsay. It’s interesting that so many of the friends I've made since leaving Ithaca are Midwesterners. It’s a part of the country where ’d spent very little time and had zero interest in. I’d only ever lived in coastal states. Midwesterners are good, gracious, and dependable people with no pretension or bullshit. I guess I must be drawn to that.
I’d surprised myself and really enjoyed every Midwestern state (except KANSAS of course). I had now visited them all except one, and I was headed there next - Missouri.
Yes, and…
Matt