A Wine & Cheese Woodstock

Mapquest declares that the travel time from my house in Elk Grove Village, Illinois to Ravinia Park is 42 minutes. Last night it proved to be about three hours, roughly the time of a flight from Chicago to Las Vegas.

It wasn't pretty. And blame it on the blues, the Moody Blues. To say that traffic congested in Highland Park, home of the Ravinia festival, would be an understatement. The Ravinia parking lots were filled and it seemed as though the police were just looking for some place to put everybody. And so we inched through the village for an hour or more before being directed to the Highland Park High School which was miles away from Ravinia. We left Elk Grove Village at 5:00 p.m. for an 8:00 p.m. concert. We barely arrived in time.

Ravinia Park is kind of a unique place. It consists of a 3,200 seat "pavilion" where the musical performance can be observed in a traditional theater setting. Everybody else brings tables, chairs, picnic baskets and blankets and settles in on the remaining 36 acres of lawn. An upscale crowd is attracted to this venue. The appearance is reminiscent of Woodstock except that nobody is naked, everybody is clean, and wine and cheese are being consumed instead of LSD and marijuana.

By the time we got to Ravinia, we weren't half a million strong. Or maybe we were. God knows it was packed in there and we looked jealously at little patches of grass that were too small to hold our party of four. And so we walked further and further to the outer reaches, near the perimeter fence, where we laid claim to a picnic table and rejoiced in our good fortune. But once the Moody Blues started to play, we realized why the table was available. There were no speakers in this immediate area. The music could be heard from other more distant speakers, but faintly. The Moody Blues were our dinner music

In some sense the Moody Blues seemed out of place at Ravinia. You see Ravinia is the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, so classical music tends to be the order of the day. On the other hand the music of the Moody Blues has traditionally been a blend of rock and classical orchestration. But when I walked to the Pavilion area to try and get a look at the band, it seemed that the orchestra was probably on tape.

The Moody Blues are old now. And so was their crowd. Their first set lasted about 45 minutes and then they took a break. They probably needed it. Then they played a second set. And about halfway through the second set people started to leave the festival in droves, like they were trying to beat a 10:00 p.m. curfew. This made no sense to me after having battled to get into the concert in the first place. Or maybe these folks wanted to get to their cars to avoid a repeat of the arrival experience.

The music was good, but I noticed something. When the Moody Blues sung their signature song, "Nights in White Satin", they omitted the poetic epilogue which includes the phrase, "Senior citizens wish they were young." Yes, the Moody Blues are senior citizens now.

Incidentally, we were transported to and from the festival by shuttle buses. There were long lines to board these buses and it was almost amusing to watch people, including ourselves, struggle to pack into those buses with tables, chairs, picnic baskets and blankets. The comfort level left much to be desired. I may not be returning to Ravinia Park anytime soon.