French rabbis in the Rush St. Starbucks

While waiting for the bus today, I saw a tall, middle-aged man walk by in a yellow baseball cap, slide-on sandals, and a full-length fur coat. Once reaching the whole Magnificent Mile area, and the sea of North Face fleece-track pants-sneakers, I could (almost) see the appeal of Hyde Park...

...But yeah, the whole Rush Street area is filled with people who are all dressed identically to one another. This is not a new discovery, and yet it surprises me every time. A seemingly infinite variety of clothing, at every price level, is available in downtown Chicago, and yet everyone's wearing the exact same thing. I had the brilliant idea to do B.A. reading in a downtown Starbucks rather than at the Reg (and I'm not being sarcastic when I call the idea "brilliant"--it's amazing what I accomplish with my laptop several miles away) and noticed that the brand-philic tend to be so on many levels. Starbucks cups, iPods, Apple laptops, North Face jackets. I looked down at my own black fake-leather jacket, purchased at a thrift store on East 23rd St. in NYC, and felt at once very with-it and very out of place. The fashion-contemplation was brief, however, since trying to figure out, rabbi by rabbi, what the Grand Rabbins of France thought about Zionism during the late 19th century, when the accounts of this are in what appears to be French, took most of my concentration. Luckily, a tall nonfat cappuccino was by my side every step of the way.