Patti sighting in Chicago (October)

[John MacDougall <xuicholti>]

A friend told me about Patti being at the MCA's annual fund raiser. Couldn't quite afford the $1500 ticket....
John
  
40th bash is 2nd to none; Museum of Contemporary Art celebrates
Chicago Sun-Times,  Oct 10, 2007  by Lisa Lenoir

      Three Chicago parties stick in my mind as being spectacular, never to be forgotten. The Old Navy store opening at State and Washington with Donna Summer in 1998. The Millennium Park gala in 2004. And now, the Museum of Contemporary Art's 40th anniversary fete Saturday. 
    As Carrie Lannon said, "This is like an In Style magazine party."
  Chair Sally Meyers Kovler and her committee uncorked a bottle and unleashed an event that will keep people talking for the next decade -- when the 50th is celebrated. When she and I talked two weeks before the event, she said, the party would be "a feast for your eyes." 
         And that it was.  
  Where do I start? With the invitation and a hardcover book dotted with a simple circular blue 40-MCA logo, featuring museum highlights? Or the cocktails on an unusually warm autumn night in the Sculpture Garden, where the guests noshed on hors d'oeuvres by Wolfgang Puck, who was running around on site? Or the interior of the museum, where you could take in the current exhibitions "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967," "Collection Highlights, 1949-2007" and "Record Times: 40 Years From the MCA Archive"? 
  Or Heffernan Morgan's designed clear tent, blocking off the street, filled with square tables and artful chairs framed overhead with illuminated squiggly silver forms dangling from the ceiling? Or the music with Patti Smith (some embarrassed young people admitted they weren't familiar with the artist known for songs such as "Because the Night") and DJ Todd Oldham "spinning tunes" on his Mac?
         And the guests? The contemporary art scene tends to attract an eclectically dressed crowd, people who are works of art themselves. Designer Nick Cave received double takes with his white shirt with multiple buttoned flaps, about which some joked that it resembled a straitjacket. Barrington native Cynthia Rowley, who was in from New York for the festivities with husband Bill Powers, went with her own dress covered with gold safety pins. "The MCA is one place we always come to," she said. 
  Chicago-based Maria Pinto wore a long black mermaid skirt with a corset and shrug. "I still remember when [the MCA] was on Ontario," she said, "and the 40th anniversary book was a flood of memories. This is where I was hatched in the arts." 
  The list was endless of who's who: Mayor Daley and wife Maggie (it was a hoot watching them bop their heads up and down to Smith's music), George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, Valerie Jarrett, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), Linda Johnson Rice and husband Mel Farr, Desiree Rogers, MCA board chair Helen Zell and artists Magdalena Abakanowicz and Dawoud Bey. 
  Robert Fitzpatrick, MCA's director and CEO, said, "This is one helluva party." He acknowledged the efforts of the museum staff and the patrons. "The sole reason the MCA exists is the artists." 
  Their unbridled forms of artistic expression and the devotion of the patrons fueled an over-the-top party to be remembered for posterity.
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