yesterday was one of those days that had me stop in the middle of all the bustle and ask myself "how the hell did i end up here?" and then just sit in awe at the random nature of it all. i went on the "crime watch" shoot with my production company - or rather with the principle producer, deb, and our audio and camera guys (doug and john). the day's itinerary covered three different topics: bulletproof/stab-resistant vests for the Illinois K-9 units, CAPS (Chicago Community Policing), and District 11 Youth Outreach.

First off, I had to drive myself to Ohio St. in downtown Chicago. I didn't really have the option of taking public transit, so there I was in my Hyundai Sonata - at rush hour - speeding onto 290 with about 500,000 other speeding vehicles. I'm not a big freeway person nor do I have much experience driving in cities as huge as Chicago, so this was a biggie. Thankfully, I made it from the west suburbs to downtown in less than in hour (this include me stopping to get gas and coffee). I didn't get lost at all. Props to me for this. I was rendezvous-ing with the crew @ the camera guy's home and from there we headed to Chicago Police Headquarters on 35th & Michigan.

This first shoot was really cool for me because I love animals. As silly as vests for dogs may seem to some people (I say this because a few of the men in my office were saying how "dumb" it was to invest all this money in outfitting canines), I thought it was very appropriate. There were 5 incredibly kind and smart german shepards with their officers in that press room and lots of teary-eyed stories about dogs that had died in the line of duty. Moving stuff.

After we did a bunch of interviews and shadowed a few of the officers during some basic k-9 protocol, we headed to lunch. i don't have a story about that except that i was, once again, playing the role of the poor college kid with no money and had to order a plain bagel with a mound of tasteless egg on it for $1.95 while everyone around me feasted on spinach quiche and turkey clubs. glad nobody commented on my lame-o meal because I would have been forced to point out the jack-shit pay i receive for this job.

This is the part of the day when things got wierd for me. We had to shoot some b-roll of heavy traffic from an overpass so instead of finding a nice bridge near some scenic skycrapers, our crew opted to find the premier location for peddling dope and all sorts of other illicit drugs and proceeded to leave me in the front seat of the van with the engine running. their instructions were for me to "keep looking forward and don't, under any circumstances, roll down the windows to talk to anyone unless they are the police." super. thumbs up. the only small ray of hope i could find on that shady block was a stoop a few doors down with a few boys about 17 years old each selling homemade snocones from a blue cooler. would have been nice if they would have offered me one after they spent 10 minutes gawking at me (black...er, white sheep, what?) but then i would have had to roll down the window and that was against the rules.

after that we traveled several blocks and i just marveled at how quickly you can go from one ethnic group's "village" to another's. polish! greek! puerto rican! hindu! italian! chinese! fortunately for me, i could have walked through 3/4 of those communities and probably blended in, but that's a whole 'nother topic all together. anyways, my gaze was abruptly startled when we turned down the street and ran right into the famous Cook County Jail complex. huge. ominous. scary. absolutely intriguing. this place actually has a moat built around it. i swear. we park in front of a 15 foot razor-barbed fence. at first i'm thinking -- good lord, i get to walk through a convicts' corridor like starling in 'silence of the lambs'? this is so awesome (sans getting hit in the face by male ejaculatory fluid...if you haven't seen 'silence of the lambs', that last comment was probably nasty beyond explanation). however, i didn't get to do an oprah-like session in the jail. we actually did a piece on a heavily-medicated senior citizen living in the government housing across the road from the jail. apparently a gang intruded in on her home and shot her small dog in the head with a pellet gun (what kind of inner-city gang packs heat with a bb gun?) and the dog proceeded to die a slow and excruciating death. a few local police officers bought her a new dog out of their own pockets along with the necessary shots and food and other care items. it was a sweet but very sad story -- not just because of the dog, but also because of how humbled i was in the face of such poor living conditions.

anyways, what was so surreal about that particular shoot was when, at one point, the whole crew had gone into the house and i,the intern, was stuck standing out in the street with the tripod. there i was, rachel, standing amongst some extraordinarily depleted projects alongside a neighbor's pen that held two barking pitbulls, staring at one of the country's roughest county prisons...and then barry white music starts to pour out of a black van in the prison parking lot. it was so bizarre. then a huge inmate-transfer bus rolls by me filled with about 20 guys staring at me through the barred windows. barry white was my soundtrack. jeez, how SURREAL. i still don't know who was playing the R&B because it stopped suddenly and i saw no trace of a person anywhere.

after we finished that shoot, we traveled to kedzie, which is also a very high crime area of the city. we went to the district 11 police station and in the basement was a large room set up like a very low-budget art cafe.

we were going to see the first annual District 11 Poetry Slam. by 5pm, the room was filled with inner-city teens who had a passion for spoken word and let me tell you - these kids were incredible. you would be hard pressed to find people, regardless of age, income, or race, who were able to communicate their thoughts and emotions in the way that these kids did. they almost had the flow of hip-hop freestyle, but there was something different about these poems...i can't quite explain. i was so impressed and taken by what i saw down there.

for some comedic relief -- our extremely white and 40-something producer deb totally stereotyped herself by spending a full 5 minutes escalating a full-on culture/generation clash by never at all grasping the concept of the word "funna". you know "i'm funna (do this"...she didn't understand what the girl meant during the interview when she was explaining the title of her poem "I'm Funna". although it was extremely funny to me, it was also embarrassing when i saw the faces of the teens and the adults in the room as deb butchered the lingo. oh lord, it was mortifying. i had to step in and explain.

anyways, there's my friday in a gigantic nutshell. but as you can see -- it was so strange for me to connect the dots of my young adult life in retrospect up to that point...you can never anticipate where you will end up from one day to the next. one day i'm sitting on the beach in st. augustine and the next day i'm nervously standing in the chicago projects in front of a prison.

damn, life is crazy, ain't it?