Cicada cuisine. Cicada sculptures. Cicada poems. Cicada blogs. Cicada tank tops, baseball hats and coffee mugs. Even a traveling CicadaMobile.
Really.
“I said to my husband, are we nuts? Who would spend money on three plane tickets just to see the cicadas?” Annie Finnegan said. “He said it’s only once every 17 years.”
Finnegan lives in Boston, but she is planning a special trip to Glenview with her husband and son to visit the “children” of the cicadas that attended her 1990 outdoor wedding.
Millions of the red-eyed, winged insects have been living underground, feasting on sap from tree roots since 1990. This week, the bugs tunneled up through the dirt and began climbing trees.
At Niles West High School this week, chemistry teacher Mike Heinz relished the opportunity to taste some freshly fried, batter-dipped cicadas as part of a fundraiser.
“It’s like a chicken nugget — a chewy chicken nugget,” he said.
But some people would rather wax poetic about the bugs than eat them.
Krista Jiannacopoulos, 42, said she had not yet seen the cicadas around her Hyde Park home, but the emergence she witnessed in 1990 inspired her to write a poem 17 years later entitled “She Cicada.”
Although Finnegan said she remembers the bugs crawling on her wedding cake, her dress and even her guests during her 1990, ceremony, she said she was more enamored with them than spooked.
“They were created or conceived potentially as we were saying, ‘I do,’ ” Finnegan said. “They haven’t seen the light of day, literally, since the time we were married.”
