We asked, and you answered. The time has come to see who represents the Best of Chicago! This year, we received , votes from 36, readers. This yearly tradition has become a Chicago staple, but in order to continue, we need your support. Chip in to help us keep this tradition alive. Who came out on top? And though it lies a mere miles northeast, the same Great Lake lapping at its shores, western Michigan might as well have been another country, for all it had in common with anything I had ever known.
And so it was no great surprise when the cultural differences made themselves apparent some two months after I had gotten settled in, when my friends in Grand Rapids began to continually bring up the fact that I had yet to acquire a boyfriend since I had moved there. I came up with excuses: I had barely gotten settled from the move. I was looking for work. I was going to school. I was busy. In reality, I was pondering a polite way to say the men in this town did not come close to meeting my standards in any way.
I softened this explanation, finally, by pointing out that there was nowhere to meet the kind of men I was interested in. And beyond that, there was nothing to do in Grand Rapids.
No place to meet people—or at least, not the skinny-jeans-wearing, vinyl-collecting, art-scene hipsters I was used to. Janice was convinced that she had found the guy for me. Exactly your type. She chose a black boat-neck shirt, black lace-up ballet shoes, and a long, pale-blue, watermarked silk skirt with satin ribbons hanging from the bottom. Pretty, but a little more French-garden-in-the-rain than I would ordinarily ever wear to a casual first date.
Still, it was in that outfit a week later that I showed up at a slightly ostentatious and vaguely southwestern-themed breakfast cafe for my blind date with Don. I had arrived first, about five minutes early, and took a seat in the waiting area. About ten minutes later, a twentysomething guy with side-parted hair and a leather jacket walked in.
