IL-Chicago-Magnificent Mile Festival of Lightsw/MSI-11/17/07

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Whinter
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Location: Beach Park, IL

IL-Chicago-Magnificent Mile Festival of Lightsw/MSI-11/17/07

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Mission Report:
Festival of Lights with MSI – Magnificent Mile
Saturday, November 17, 2007

Event Coordinator: Cheryl Whitaker

TOD Participants:
TI3127 – Cheryl Whitaker – TIE Pilot
TI1296 – Joseph Flores – TIE Pilot
TB1335 - William Ross - Biker Scout
Lukez1128 – Luke Zintak (RL) – Farmboy Luke Skywalker
SolariWielder - Lauren Slattery (RL) – ANH Princess Leia

The weather may have been cold and wet, but everyone’s spirits were warm at the Festival of Lights on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago. The City of Chicago holds this festival every year to help ring in the holiday shopping season. During the day there were live concerts by several performers (including KT Tunstall and Sister Hazel), as well as many different booths lined up on “Lights Festival Lane”. One of the booths was the Eli’s Cheesecake booth that gave out complimentary cheesecakes!

We started our shift at the Museum of Science & Industry’s booth at 11:00 am. Our duty was to mingle with the crowd, as well as to hand out brochures and activity books to the kids as they passed by. Sometimes that became quite a difficult task though. The weather might not have been perfect, but you would never know it with all the people that showed up for the festival. At times we were completely swarmed with crowds wanting to have their picture taken with us! We couldn’t even move, much less pass out the books! We actually had Sister Hazel, one of the performing groups, come over and ask to have their picture taken with us! And at one point, WGN radio even came over and interviewed Luke and Lauren.

We stood and took pictures from 11:00 to 5:15 with only one break of about 15 minutes. It was exhausting, but a lot of fun too. The steady drizzle didn’t really bother us all day until it started to get dark. Then we got really chilled and I even started to shiver. It was definitely time to get out of the rain and into somewhere warm. We said our good-bye’s to everyone that was still in the MSI booth and headed for warmth.

Once we were able to leave the booth and start walking down the street, we were able to see a lot more of the festive touches the city had to offer. The trees along North Michigan Avenue were covered with more than one million lights from Oak Street to Wacker Drive, not to mention all the colorful decorations! At the end of the daytime festivities, they closed off Michigan Avenue to host a fantastic light parade, complete with Disney characters and floats! I personally didn’t stay for the actual parade. I wanted to get out of Chicago before the “mass exodus” from the city!

I can’t thank our participants enough for coming out to this event! The weather was miserable but you never heard one complaint (except for me saying how cold I was toward the end of the night). :lol: Thank you all! You really brought a lot of smiles to a lot of people!

Cheryl’s Pictures:

http://s180.photobucket.com/albums/x273 ... %20Lights/

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