baila, guapa

in addition to black history month, the chinese and korean new years, groundhog day, family day, and darwin day, in chicago february is also host to the chicago flamenco festival, a month-long celebration of the spanish music and dance form, with various performances given throughout the city. i am by no means a flamenco afficionado, but i just totally love watching and listening to it. the music and dancing is at once delicate and aggressive, the movement is fluid and also abrupt, and the wrists are just...enchanting! this saturday was the final performance, and i thought it'd be fun to go. unfortunately, so did a lot of other people who presumably had heard about the event before i'd even arrived in town, and they got all the tickets.

i really wanted to go, so i told my new friend kim about this dilemma, and she said she figured we could get in. we made some calls and planned our possible points of entry. the first move was to arrive early to the show, when ticketless potential patrons would be given a number based on their arrival, which would then determine the order in which returned or cancelled tickets were distributed. so we got to the front of that line, and while we waited kim reviewed our other options. we'd both come dressed as ushers in the event that more were needed, and kim had brought black tux jackets so that we could dress up as caterers and walk past the ticket takers in that capacity. (this is a ruse kim has successfully pulled off before, and is both one of many things that has made getting to know her a real adventure and the main reason i think she is a direct descendant of macguyver. also, i think she might be crazy.)

it was a very stormy and snowy night, so several tickets were returned and as kim and i were first in line, we had no trouble getting in after all. the show was quite enjoyable, and afterwards we went to a reception where was served tapas and sangría. the wine, the bocadillos, and the spanish accents flying around the room transported me back to ehspain, and overall i had a really great night. kim did, too, although i expect she would have preferred to have gotten in in some way that required a grappling hook and made less use of the front door.