There was a man, not too many warm days ago, gunning his motorcycle outside the bar/restaurant named Melvin B’s, and reminding me, with a shudder, that summer was coming. Melvin B’s, where Rush meets State, is a place so packed in warm weather that its patrons often spill out onto the sidewalk, stumble into the street or howl at the moon or at the scantily clad men and women who dare and desire to stroll by. One of the bar’s owners, the legendarily lively Jack Binyon, is among the people we at the Magazine asked to recall a “crazy” summer memory and he came up with a beauty. You’ll find it and other such memories on the following pages, along with a list of strange summer festivals (What do you mean you’ve never attended the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle Summerfest Birthday Party in Collinsville?), a calendar of more traditional events, Tribune critics’ picks for summer cultural enrichment, and a lovely, anything-but-odd essay by local novelist Elizabeth Berg. You will not find any theories about why summer makes some people crazy, except this one: The sounds of summer are what drive us wild. In the winters we have, more or less, control over our environments, our personal space, since we mostly live indoors. But come summer, we are assaulted by all sorts of sounds over which we have no control: car radios, loud conversations and the increasingly prevalent roar of motorcycles. Some people are so overwhelmed by this that they become vulnerable to a short-circuiting of reason, and will sometimes during the summer manifest their own crazy behavior. But anything that makes you crazy can also make you happy: Think about love. And so others will seek out the season’s happy sounds. They venture to the beach to hear the lapping of waves, to Ravinia for a string quartet, or to Grant Park for an outdoor movie, and that moment when it is possible to believe that the tap-tap-tap of Fred Astaire’s feet is actually the sound of an angel dancing on a cloud.
