“Most people love Halloween,” said Maggie Daley, Chicago’s first lady, proving the point with her witch’s costume. “It gives us all a chance to be young and have a little fun.”
“It’s always a festive day,” added Mayor Richard M. Daley, dressed in a vest decorated with jack-o’-lanterns. “There’s something about it that brings out the best in people.” He recalled guests bobbing for apples at the Halloween parties his father, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, held in their home.
The mayor and his wife were the hosts of the seventh annual Halloween Ball, held Friday night at the Chicago Cultural Center. They were joined by daughter Elizabeth “Lally” Daley, who brought a group of gal pals dressed as troll dolls.
About 500 patrons attended the event, which began with a cocktail reception under the Tiffany stained-glass dome in Preston Bradley Hall and was followed by dinner and dancing in the Sidney Yates Gallery. During the cocktail hour, masked waiters in Halloween black (suits) and orange (ties) served orange and green potions; the New Orleans-style marching band Mystick Krewe of Laff led a conga line of costumed revelers; and students and teachers from the CircEsteem circus arts school prowled the crowd costumed as a towering vampire, grim reaper and other ghouls.
The $600-per-person, costume-or-black tie event raised funds for the Cultural Center’s programs, which include almost 900 free art, dance, film, music and theater exhibits and performances a year.
State Sen. James DeLeo and his wife, Ann, came to the party dressed as pirates. “I have all the money to settle the budget for the RTA and CTA,” the senator joked. “I can take care of it with a couple of bags of gold I found in a shipwreck at the bottom of Lake Michigan.” In truth, he’ll return to Springfield Thursday, when the legislature is scheduled to take up transit funding, after he and Ann host an annual neighborhood Halloween party in their home Wednesday night that draws more than 1,000 trick-or-treaters.
The tattered pale Victorian-era outfits that Bob and Ilyse Lopatin chose were meant to be ghosts — maybe. “I think we’re supposed to be rising from the dead, but we don’t really know,” said Bob, the chief operating officer of real estate development company Friedman Properties. “We saw them; we like them; they matched.”
Boeing co-workers Rhonda Beason-Jordan and Indira Harper came dressed as two very different kinds of felines — Catwoman and a black panther, respectively. “It’s fun to dress up once a year. You can be whoever you want to be,” said Beason-Jordan, who is about to graduate from Columbia College with a journalism degree. “I don’t care if I look silly, because I’m behind glasses,” said Harper, who was auditioning her outfit before taking her 5-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son trick-or-treating around their home in Hyde Park.
An investment banker who left Wall Street to move back home to Chicago, Lerry Knox brought radio advertising sales executive Farissa Alexander with him to the city — and to the ball. “New York’s a great place, but Chicago’s where you want to be, raise your kids,” Knox said.
Instead of wearing a costume, Francoise Friedman delighted in fitting into the same dress her daughter once wore to prom, but she relished the Halloween Ball’s holiday spirit. “They go all out,” said Friedman, who was joined by her husband, Richard, an attorney. “What’s really great is people’s imagination.”
