Three standard ingredients at a wedding reception are dancing, photography, and alcohol. To succeed, a wedding reception should include no more than two of those ingredients. And one of the included ingredients must be alcohol.

I formulated that nostrum this past weekend at a Marriott Resort hotel in the exurban wasteland north of Chicago, where I attended the wedding and wedding reception of a family friend of my wife. The wedding was an unpretentious and perfectly touching affair. The groom, and the ceremony, were Jewish. The bride, and the apparel of both bride and groom (all the way down to his pointed-toe slippers), were Indian Muslim. Neither the Jewish nor the Muslim tradition has allowed its people to rely much on alcohol as a social lubricant, and this couple’s reception—300 stiffly attired attendees in a large, brightly lit tent, of whom the only people I knew were about a dozen of my in-laws—was therefore lamentably dry.

If managers of the Marriott Resort were counting on a big booze tab to help them make their numbers that weekend, then they were in for a world of financial hurt. That Saturday, the only other event being held at the hotel was a gathering of Christian Broadcasting Network “partners.” Jews and Muslims and Christians, oh my! And all of them, along with assorted beer-swilling secular types, had convened under the same suburban roof. This is a great country.

On trips to and from the hotel bar, I eyed those CBN partners as they shuffled about in little prayer groups. Their average age was about 61; their average pigment was lily-white. The highlight of their evening, according to a program that I peeked at, was to be an after-dinner speech by Pat Robertson. The Pat Robertson. All night, I remained on the lookout for the old goat, hoping that his appearance would make the day’s disharmonic convergence complete, but I never saw him and no high jinks ensued, alas.

I did savor a small irony, though (and a small irony goes down almost as smoothly as a pint of lager). The CBN organizers called their event “Reclaiming the Covenant,” presumably in reference to the pact between the Saviour and the saved. Meanwhile, around the corner from the ballroom where Robertson would later come to bless the reclamation work of CBN, a man and a women entered a different sort of covenant. Nor was the couple’s pact merely metaphorical, since in the Jewish tradition the partners to a marriage typically draft and sign an actual contract. It’s called a Katubah. That afternoon, I watched as alternately the bride and the groom read from their Katubah—shortly before the groom picked up his slippered foot and smashed a ceremonial wine glass.

And so we leave the quaint precincts of Chicago. We leave behind a land of tall buildings, big shoulders, and toddlin’ people, but we take with us our memories—our thrilling, thrilling memories . . .

I just returned from a long weekend in Chicagoland, for the chief purpose of attending a wedding. The city was gorgeous, the wedding was lovely, and I had a fine time all-around. But I never did find an answer to a question that has long burned a hole in some pocket of my brain: What is this thing called “toddlin’”? I did learn that Chicago gained the nickname “Windy City” not because of the gales of air that sweep through the Loop from Lake Michigan, but by virtue of a New York journalist who, in the late 19th century, raised an eyebrow at the gusts of self-boosting oratory that emanated from the rising prairie metropolis. (The eyebrow-raiser was Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, and the occasion was Chicago’s bid to host a world’s fair in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492. The story of that fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, is the main subject of The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, a book that provided companion reading during my trip.) Still, what Frank Sinatra and others mean when they sing the praises of “that toddlin’ town” remains a mystery.

Perhaps, in the local argot, “toddlin’” means smoking. The native inhabitants of Chicago certainly do a lot of it. Or so it seemed to me, a smoke-phobic man who spends all of his time in coastal big cities where law and custom have exiled smokers to tiny outdoor enclaves. Out in the Heartland, the “health fascists”—as a Heartland-type friend of mine labeled those who object to smoking in public places—have relatively little sway. There, even in a place as cosmopolitan as Chicago, a Midwestern, mid-century way of life still flourishes. The men are men (which is to say, at the least, that they take Bears and Cubs and Bulls and similar fauna very seriously), the women all say “Hon,” and people of all sexes and stripes embrace red meat, blue smoke, and other traditional pleasures.

Chicagoans also embrace architecture. They embrace their architecture, anyway, and do so with breath-taking pride. A group called the Chicago Architecture Foundation conducts roughly 70 different tours—by bus, by boat, or on foot—of the city’s various compositions of “frozen music” (as Goethe once called the art of building). No other city that I’ve visited, not even New York or London, has anything like the CAF or its well-managed series of professional-grade tours. I went on one of these expeditions, “Highlights by Bus,” and hope to write later about what I saw on it.

A quick note, meanwhile, to be filed under “business ideas that I won’t pursue.” There are glass-bottom boats, or at any rate there used to be: Hollywood even made a movie that featured one of them. Why not a glass-topped bus? Just as a glass-bottom boat reveals to its riders the undersea wonders that lie under their feet, so a glass-topped bus would expose to their view the glorious spectacle that rises overhead. Last Friday, as a comfy CAF bus wended its way through downtown Chicago, a tour guide pointed out several illustrious buildings that soared to the skies alongside me and my fellow passengers: Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium building, the postmodern Harold Washington Library Center, and so on. But we couldn’t see those “highlights”—not by bus anyway, for the vehicle’s roof obstructed our view.

So, instead of gazing up, I gazed out the window at passers-by, wondering whether what they were doing counted as toddlin’.