Stranger danger, part two

On a bus headed south on State Street, early afternoon. At 9^th Street, two young women (early 30s) get on the bus. Suddenly the dark-haired woman is talking very loudly and aggressively. “Well, I didn’t know. I don’t have my star with me. OK, so I’ll know for next time.”  The driver's apparently insisting on payment because the woman’s voice grows louder and more belligerent. She has only a wallet and keys in her hands. Now she’s throwing out bits of her cred. Sometimes she drives a CTA radio car, she says. She’s “been on the job 10 years and she's never heard of this” (she’s not in uniform, how is the driver supposed to know she’s legitimate? “On the job” equals free ride?) The driver points to a notice on the bus dashboard. Oh. Woman’s voice rises. Driver asks her for second time to lower her voice. The woman’s friend says: “We’ll remember this next time we get a CTA call.” A young man with a baby walks to front of bus saying he needs to get going. Can he pay? Dark-haired woman says no, driver says yes. Woman in front of me makes a phone call, calls out to the dark-haired woman that she’s got the police on the line. Angry woman takes the phone and outlines the disagreement and asks for a supervisor to come to the scene. Driver’s not going anywhere now. Young man and baby get off the bus along with a handful of other people. Among the passengers around me, sentiment favors the loud-mouthed woman over the driver.

I’m thinking the young woman is unprofessional, way too entitled and oddly volatile. I wouldn’t want to encounter her “on the job.”  She’s pacing the aisle, her eyes tearing apart the air inside the bus. That makes me decide to get off. I look at her face as I walk past her. Her eyes are darting, reddened. She does not look at me. I feel safer getting off the bus and walking home. 

Violence at the symphony

Stranger danger: When a violent altercation erupts in the midst of a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, I wonder what’s happening to us, what’s happening to civility.  Are the financial, real estate, political meltdowns of the past three years affecting our ability to co-exist peacefully and respectfully?

Tuesday night at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, middle of Row K on the main floor for a program that begins with the Suite from “The Love for Three Oranges, Op.33a” by Prokofiev. The music is wonderfully tumultuous, athletic, challenging to musicians and audience. Melody lines are tossed about the sections of the orchestra. With a full complement of musicians, the suite fills the auditorium with a riot of sound ­– dissonance, atonality and confounding contradictions and splendid melodies. Suddenly an older woman four seats to my left leaps to her feet and begins hitting the young man to her left with her program. Then she sits down and calmly and deliberately presses flat the pages of her program.

Stunning, distracting, mystifying. These were strangers. They had come in at different times, from different directions. As the lights dimmed following intermission, the four seats in the middle of Row K sat empty.  One patron said afterwards, “strangers don’t behave like that.” But they did.