It's possible to be so far from the stage at Ravinia that you wouldn't even have seen these lovely lights. To debunk a popular myth...as you can see, there were men at the show -- though some of them couldn't figure out where the stage was. Late in the evening, the Indigo Girls were menaced by this Massive Disembodied Hand of Death (and its Evil Watch). Things looked grim 'til the day was saved by Zarthro, King of the Robots, who can be seen entering from the left-hand side of the photo.

(Editor's Note: Ravinia is a chi-chi outdoor venue in Chicago's north suburbs. Typically the province of orchestras, jazz bands and baby-boomer-friendly artists, it's the sort of place where people sit on $300 Pottery Barn deck chairs, drink wine and cheese and babble incessantly while devoting an occasional half-ear to an artist performing in the distant pavilion. Once or twice each summer, Ravinia attempts to host some sort of rock show -- an event for which the venue is spectacularly ill-suited. While Splendid doesn't make a habit of covering the Indigo Girls, we found this report very entertaining -- and not just because it doesn't mention lesbians.)

For a summer solstice performance by Shannon Curfman and the Indigo Girls, Ravinia hosted 50,000 girls (and a smattering of their sensitive male friends) far more hospitably than they did the 50,000 cars that brought them there. The parking plan consisted of a single column of cars filing into progressively more distant lots, like an obnoxiously slow plague of locusts. Shuttles crammed with ticket holders continued to pour into the park more than an hour after the performance had started.

I was among the many waiting to get in during 15 year-old wunderkind Shannon Curfman’s opening set. The outdoor venue's non-existent acoustics failed to carry any of the sound out to those at the gate. A quick survey of local reaction revealed a consensus: "She was pretty good, but I wasn’t really paying attention".

Ravinia is a strange venue -- a parklike setting with rolling lawns and trees, with small speakers piping in the sounds of the performance. Many areas have no clear line of sight to the pavilion structure. The only evidence that there’s a live performance going on somewhere is the lack of other plasible explanations for the wall-to-wall people blanketing the ground in the dark and the drizzle.

The air was sultry, as someone once said. It wasn’t clear whether the filmy swirls through which the stagelights played were mechanically or meteorologically generated, but the effect was pleasantly hazy (much like the sound, which the wind buffed into familiar strains without many intelligible words). For the first few songs, any break in the action gave way to organized chants of "LOUDER!" from the crowd, which apparently were not loud enough for the band to hear. Overall, the effect was much like watching a familiar TV show across a crowded bar.

In a surprise to some old-timers, the newest member of the Girls was non-girl Matt Brubeck (yes, he's Dave's son) on the cello. If anyone was afraid of getting cooties, they didn’t let it spoil the music or the evening.

Despite the heat and humidity, the band was relaxed, the music gelled and the damp masses seemed content. The Girls did a lot more crowd pleasing than usual, perhaps to compensate for the rain (though sporadic bursts of lightning brought some of the loudest cheers of the evening). The show included a hearty helping from early 90’s albums Indigo Girls and Rites of Passage, and brought the crowd to their feet for "Shame on You". The audience remained standing through the closing set -- "Closer to Fine", "Chickenman", "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" and "Galileo". As usual, people sang along with Emily’s ballads and bopped silently but supportively during Amy’s harder-to-croon numbers.

The Girls will be touring extensively this year, with acoustic dates in August and September,