The title of this post is from the song “Chicago,” which has been sung by various people from Judy Garland to Tony Bennett. It was going through my head for a good portion of the time I was in Chicago. The lyrics are pretty clever. Here is how it begins:

I got the surprise,
the surprise of my life
I had to stop and stare
I saw a man dancing
with his own wife
And you will never guess where

Chicago, Chicago
That toddlin’ town, the toddlin’ town
Chicago, Chicago
I’ll show you around, I love it
Bet your bottom dollar
you lose the blues
In Chicago, Chicago
The town that Billy Sunday
could not shut down

I particularly love the line about the surprise in seeing a man dancing with his own wife. Among the three largest cities in America (Los Angeles, New York and Chicago), it has always seemed to me that Chicago is the one where “small town values,” such as lack of pretention, friendliness and family ties, are the strongest. Still, Chicago has its wild side (Al Capone and the mafia, corruption in city government) and apparently even Billy Sunday couldn’t shut it down. (Billy Sunday, by the way, was a popular major league baseball player during the 1880s, who later became the most influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He was a big proponent of prohibition and some say his preaching played the key role in the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.) Continue reading →