Will It Play in Peoria?

 A phrase that was completely unfamiliar to me before 2022, "Will it play in Peoria?" was according to Wikipedia because they do such a better job of explaining than me, a phrase traditionally used to ask whether a given product, person, promotional theme, or event will appeal to mainstream United States, or across a broad range of demographic and psychographic groups.

The "Peoria" in that phrase was Peoria, IL, which reflected middle America at the time and its Midwestern culture a the "mainstream," and nowadays I don't think it's much different: I would submit Chicago, IL as a great "test market" for any things that will appeal to wide swaths of the American public, not just the Ivy League elites on the East Coast or West Coast hipsters, and even with TikTok and a variety of other social media services that influence culture, I can still see it every time I travel through the Midwest: mainstream culture. 

Nowhere was this more reflected better than in my most recent trip to Chicago, where I spent a LONG day before New Year's Eve weekend at O'Hare Airport (Midway airport was compromised due to the aforementioned problems with Southwest), mostly at the American Airlines lounge. Families, friends, business travelers, people on vacation, families with children, all flooded through the airport on their way to different areas around the country, and all apparently needing a McDonald's or a Starbucks (depending on their priority to quench their hunger, thirst, or fatigue). O'Hare airport, at one time one of the busiest airports in the world (now that honor I think belongs to Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta) serving the second-largest city in the US (used to be Chicago before it was overtaken by LA) was featured on "Home Alone 2" as an important plot point, where Kevin McAllister (MacCauley Culkin) gets lost at the airport when his family is bustling through the airport to make it to their gate on time after waking up late that morning. Boy do I relate to that, both the rush to the airport (I'm like 20 for 23 on making it on my flight after close-shave trips to the airport, but those 3 times I missed the flight were pretty painful), and that sprint through O'Hare has always stayed with me even when I walk through the airport roughly 26 years later, like I'm revisiting a scene from my own childhood. 

Also, the visit to the airport reminds me of how far America has come since the pandemic: While China is barely coming out of it now, finally ripping off the band-aid after almost 3 years in lockdown trying to chase down the elusive white whale of zero Covid, the US is pretty much back to pre-pandemic travel rates, with less and less people wearing masks (ill-advised, IMO, but not a tradeoff people are willing to make anymore) and getting back to the lives of Christmas parties, New Year's Eve Celebrations, and rushing through airports. For some reason, I've had fond memories of spending time at airports perhaps because it's one of the best places to people-watch (better than even Disneyworld, music concerts, and outdoor parks) just from the sheer volume of people coming in and out. It's definitely not because of the jacked-up prices of food inside the hospitals or the consistently disappointing attitude I get from TSA agents (did they never get a morale boost from the movie Get Hard or at least understand the irony of being mean and condescending TSA agents?) but the idea of O'Hare airport being the hub of people going from one place to another and branching out, like life passing through and intersecting with others' lives, has an odd appeal to me. Oh and there are some weird places that American Airlines flies to from Chicago: Bozeman, MT? Grand Rapids, MI? Davenport, Iowa? And with a name trivia nerds love, Grand Forks, North Dakota. Yup, for one glorious day at the end of the year of our Lord 2022, I was at the center of it all, of civilization itself: the American Airlines terminal at O'Hare Airport.