CUTE!!! - August 6, 2008

On Monday I took some vacation time and made my way over to the Lincoln Park Zoo. I’d never been there before and was skeptical of how an entire zoo could be built in the middle of a place like Lincoln Park. I have mixed feelings about the zoo—on the one hand, zoos educate people, nurse sick animals back to health, and expose people to wonderful creatures they’d otherwise never see, on the other hand the animals all sort of look like they’re going crazy—pacing and chewing off their fur. But I saw the cutest thing when I was there. At the polar bear exhibit two bears straight out of a Coca-Cola commercial were swimming loops around their pool. The larger of the two liked to swim by, inches from the glass and eye the crowd. Then one little girl—Emily—freckled and pig-tailed stood in front of the aquarium and put her hand on the glass. The big polar bear swam right up to her, cocked his head, and on the other side of the glass he put his paw against hers.

I know that polar bears are vicious creatures, far more dangerous than their grizzly cousins. Maybe that bear thought Emily looked like a baby seal—easy pickings, but for that moment it was enough to imagine the bear looking out at the crowd and finding the one person willing to reach out to him. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.

Also filed under cute would be Rec Room’s August 6^th fundraiser show, CUTE!!! Oh how we reveled in the cuteness—power points of dogs in boxer shorts, slideshows of a Korean toddler singing the Beatles. We played a match ‘em up game with baby pictures and listened to poetry, stories of childhood and short stories. in miniature sang about China, and somewhere, someone won some precious moment statues at our raffle.

Thank you to everyone who performed and to all you who came to see the show. It was a blast, and it was cute as hell!