And, then ... there was the food:
Yummmmm! As I've mentioned, in my long stretch of little-to-no-income, one of the most depressing things for me has been not being able to go out to nice restaurants, so when I find myself "inadvertently" in one, I really enjoy it. Plus, this was a serious deal, as I'm sure what I had to shell out for attending the event was less than half what this lunch would have cost in the restaurant. We had a choice between a steak, salmon, and chicken, but I figured it would be nuts to NOT order beef when at Gibson's, so I went with that. This was massive, about 6x5x2" and beautifully done, with about a half a head of broccoli on one side and an awesome potato construction on the other. Then they brought out dessert. No, that's not a single serving (!!!), but for the table, but a foot-high carrot cake is an amazing thing to behold, plus an ice cream bombe, which you can't tell from this shot, that had a total outside crusting of whole toasted macadamias! I so wanted a "doggy bag"!
It turns out that I was "confused" about the event ... I had assumed (as I'd heard about it from their Twitter posts) that this was a program being run by 435Digital, but it was actually an event by EventBrite, who had invited in 435Digital and TribNation to do a presentation. This also worked out well for me, as I had the "lightbulb" idea to interview the EventBrite "Chicago Event Evangelist", Sara Altier, for my Wednesday The Job Stalker post (which I didn't have anything lined up for).
So, after lunch, Ms. Altier and I headed down the block to Starbucks, found the last two seats together (at the big common table), and proceeded to do a live interview. This was very strange for me, as "I'm not a journalist - I just write journals" but it worked out great, if taking a lot more time than the e-mail interviews do! All in all, a very pleasant and productive middle of the day.
