Crushed between a shoulder to the front and an elbow behind, this full-frontal assault easily could have been a beer line in the left field bleachers. Then, baptized from above by a stein of amber brew, all doubt was washed away: This well-lubricated vise belonged more in Wrigley Field than a North Loop restaurant opening.
Not just any old eatery, Holy Cow! this one`s named Harry Caray`s, and just about every mug that`s ever tipped a few with the Mayor of Rush Street was somewhere in this human stew.
”Is he running for president yet?” asked a man in a propeller-topped beanie who said he was ”the Bleacher Preacher,” Jerry Pritikin. ”Harry missed coming out to the bleachers this year so you might say this is his trip to the bleachers.
”At the bleachers you wouldn`t see the $60 ties you see in this crowd,” he noted. ”But Harry`s fans wear anything and everything. Even nothing I guess if there`s a nudist colony with a satellite dish.”
Indeed, the man with the twin-TV-screen glasses is every fan`s fan wherever Chicago Cubs baseball blares from the tube. That is, in 46 states where WGN is broadcast and in parts of Central America where it`s bootlegged. This night, though, it was on his very own turf that the voice of the Cubs was being toasted. And the line-up was all-star:
Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks, was there, wrapping his arm around Harry.
”What we love about Harry is, whether things are up or down, he makes us laugh. In all walks of life, he has a magic charisma,” said the Hall of Famer, who flew in from L.A. for Wednesday`s opening of Harry`s steak, pasta and chop house in the old Miller`s Steak House at Kinzie and Dearborn.
”In the city of big mouths, he`s the biggest one,” mumbled Mike Royko, shuffling toward the palm-lined vestibule where Harry was holding court.
Rich Melman, who knows something about serving up vittles, bit into a toasted ravioli and said of the man known for haunting his night spots:
”We`re losing a helluva customer, but this is what Harry means to Chicago. He`s vital, he`s alive. He`s the Mike Ditka of the broadcasting booth. He lives and dies for the Cubs to win and we love him for it. He`s a legend.”
Aaron Freeman, the man who made a comedy of Council Wars, opined: ”Harry Caray opening a restaurant is like a cold beer on a hot summer day. You just gotta love it.”
Noting the lack of breathing room, he said: ”This is definitely the A list. There are so many beautiful people, I can`t find room in front of the mirror.”
The host himself, sipping often from a tall glass of ice water, took a moment from back-slapping the boys and bussing the girls to note: ”I feel great about this. There has to be affection involved, me for them and them for me. One of the reasons I thought about a restaurant is the chance to rub elbows with the people I love-the fans.”
IT`S A GREEK TRAGEDY IN COMICAL CHICAGO STYLE From across the gilded ballroom, you`d never guess that Orpheus and Euridice were held together with rubber and gasket adhesive and that Euridice`s ostrich plumes were plucked from table decorations at someone else`s charity ball.
But it`s the truth. ”Cross my heart and hope to die, can you believe it?” Kay Heyman, the person underneath the plucked plumes, said breathlessly as she laid bare the anatomy of the opera costumes she`d toiled over for the past three months in preparation for Friday night`s Bal Masque VII, the annual charity ball for the Chicago Opera Theater, held at the Drake Hotel.
”This is recycling in the true fashion of the day,” she noted, poking her Orphean partner, Irving Nuger, in the chest. ”His foil is customarily wrapped around flowerpots, but I took it off to use for the lyre. And you know what my plumes are glued to? Look, you`re never going to believe this, they`re from a peplum I found on a dress in the attic.
”And the hundreds of feathers, I really did take them from another charity ball, held last year in this very room; so these plumes are returning home, you see. Anyway, at the end of the night I was a little happy; so I went around collecting them from tables, pretending I was making a fan.”
Heyman`s mate for the night, Nuger, took all this in stride as he sipped his scotch, his two skinny legs in white tights bared for all the world to see. ”I just got back two days ago from climbing Mt. Fuji and white-water rafting the Alas River in Indonesia, so I wasn`t around for most of the work,” he noted.
”Actually last year I wanted to kill him by the night of the ball;
tonight I could marry him,” Heyman said, stuffing a ham-and-melon kebab in her Orpheus` mouth. ”With my eye for design and his sense of engineering, we`re an unbeatable team.
”And,” she added, as she swirled away to meet up with her furies,
”with that gasket glue, I swear to you, we`ll never come apart.”
The home-sewn Orpheus and Euridice, true to the ancient myth from which they were inspired, may be stuck for life, but, sad to say, they and the rest of their ensemble-actually, Act II, Scene II, of the opera-were not unbeatable when it came to the night`s competition.
The award for best tableau at the ball went to an eclectic sextet who titled themselves, ”Sunday Afternoon in the Park with Sir Georg.”
A Greek tragedy, indeed.
