Tom Lynch

The Clark Street McDonald's seems abandoned.

Jimmy Buffet and all his entourage play Wrigley Field, the first show at the legendary baseball stadium...ever. The stage, positioned in a lonely centerfield, reaches high enough to cover the green scoreboard. For the first time since early April, the bleachers are empty. The field, crowded with chairs, hosts a sold-out gathering of fans, as does the stands. It's almost at 40,000.Wrigley's filled to capacity. Again. There's a voice all of a sudden--we know that voice--it's Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks. He's welcoming the Parrotheads. Thunderous cheers.

As the show kicks off, the day before the country celebrates non-laboring, the national anthem fills the streets. Wrigley sings along. Outside, spectators hear with stunted awe--they believe it's happening, they're aware of the "historic" aspect that has been crammed down Chicagoans throats throughout the weekend, but they don't care. Not even the massive red blimp overhead can stop them from getting Sunday evening beer. Everyone's off tomorrow, after all.

"There's a lot more people, that's for sure," says one ticket taker at Wrigley's gates, in comparison to a regular Cubs debacle when only Cubs players take the field. The audience has already poured inside, the entrance spots are calm. Buffet sings, but it's muffled by the halls of the stadium and lost in the air as the sound spills onto Waveland Avenue. Inside, vendors sell margaritas like they're Cubs-blue Old Styles, and fans guzzle them down. It's clear, immediately, that by the end of the show, more than a million dollars will be spent on booze. "Anything to forget New Orleans," says one passerby, commenting on Buffet's escapist appeal. Does he have a ticket? "No way, it's too much money."

After a brief intermission, Buffet holds a seventh-inning stretch, sings "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" with an adorning forty thousand. The ticker-takers have given up and abandoned their posts. The margaritas still flow. Traffic at Clark and Addison is still jammed. This is going to last all weekend.

As the show closes--early for a concert, around 9pm--Parrotheads fly into the street, donning, almost uniformly, Hawaiian leis. They hit the Cubby Bear. They hit Bar Louie, down the street. They make it all the way to Southport. They drunkenly whisper about the horrors down South, obviously sparked by Buffet's encore, a spotlighted rendition of late singer Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans," which has left the crowd reeling. Clark St. is mobbed with multicolored shirts, khaki shorts and sandals. The crowd, as expected, tips the older scale, but that doesn't protect one bespectacled gentleman, wearing a Wrigley Field-Jimmy Buffet white tee, from being doused with brew. "The best show of my life," he says, "the best show of my life."

(2005-09-06)

Also by Tom Lynch

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John Irving's eleventh novel, the tender, melancholic and ambitious "Until I Find You," seems like the next step for the author of "The World According to Garp" and "The Cider House Rules."
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Tip of the Week
Arks, fronted by local graphic novelist Paul Hornschemeier, mix damp Brit-pop with space-out death marches and matches early influences from Joy Division to Sonic Youth
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Tip of the Week
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Soundcheck
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The Stalker Syndrome
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Soundcheck
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Fiction Review
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Tip of the Week
(2005-07-21)

Telescopic pop
(2005-07-19)

Tip of the Week
(2005-07-05)

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