Horton Foote, River North Dance Chicago, Chanticleer Garden: one April weekend 2013

If you came here just for the pictures, here they are—Chanticleer Garden, April 7, 2013, a brand new season of color and verve. The secret garden elves have spent the winter widening paths, planting pots, putting the start of lettuce into rows. They have had a ball with succulents. And the big bright fish are alive.

If you wondered how I'd felt about seeing "The Trip to Bountiful" at People's Light and Theatre Company on Friday evening with my father, wonder no more. It was a full-throttle production, emotionally speaking, and elegant in all other ways. I believed in these characters and their stories, the two side-by-side chairs that constituted a bus, the painted mural that was the landscape of memory. I believed in the anger and in the momentary resolve.

And finally, River North Dance Chicago, presented last evening at Annenberg Center. There are, apparently, young men and women whose bodies are only muscle and air, not bone. There are choreographers who can bring Eva Cassidy back to life. There is a dancer named Jessica Wolfrum who can make a dress breathe and a dancer named Ahmad Simmons whose muscular nomenclature is like nothing I've ever seen, and who danced within the quick strobe of light, his arms like wings. Then there were those who danced in and out of elastic shirts without ever losing track of time.

Or perhaps they lost all track of time, and that is why I was so mesmerized.