CHICAGO — Yesterday, local alternative newspaper The Chicago Reader announced the winners of its annual “Best of Chicago” reader poll. The winners of these awards — local officials, artists, restaurateurs, business owners, and more — have excitedly announced that this award has finally given them the career boost they needed to move to New York City.
Across social media, winners of the “Best of Chicago” spent yesterday posting their thanks to the Chicagoans and mail bots that voted for them in the Reader’s month-long poll, as well as farewells to the city that supported them.
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“It’s been so great coming up in Chicago,” said an Instagram post by Music Box Theater, winner of “Best Film Programming” and “Best Drive-In Movie Programming,” “but it’s time for us to move on. Winning two awards has shown us that we can be more than a ‘local’ talent. We’ll never forget our time in Chicago, and we can’t wait for what comes next in THE BIG APPLE!”
Other institutions, such as PAWS Chicago, winner of “Best Animal Rescue Organization,” and Bungalow, winner of “Best Bread,” were congratulatory in their public posts, but quick to reach out to social media contacts in New York with the news.
“Yeah, PAWS hit me up out of the blue,” said James Grass, 27, an aspiring actor who moved to New York City from Chicago in 2018, “wanted to know if I was looking for a roommate in May and if there were any open mics I could recommend. I told them it’s a pretty crowded scene, but they kept going on about ‘momentum.’”
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“A lot of Chicago can’t handle a sudden burst of success,” said Miranda Hawkins, 46, a PR representative for the Chicago Cubs, winner of 2019’s “Best Pro Mens’ Sports Team,” “we’ve been conditioned to think of a move to either of the coasts as the next step we need to make as soon as we achieve anything. The moment last year’s winners were announced we were considering a move to Brooklyn, but rent is crazy there. We could have been the Newark Cubs at best.”
Despite warnings from other Chicagoans who tried to make the leap to the country’s largest metropolis and plea from the local scene to not contribute to the depletion of Chicago’s culture cache, winners of this year’s “Best of Chicago” continued to announce their plans to try to “make it,” though few could articulate what they mean by that.
“Love you, Chicago,” said Half Day CBD, winner of “Best Local CBD Source” in a Facebook post, “but this CBD source has to fly to a bigger sky. We read an article years ago on Vuture about how the guy who made High Maintenance sold that pilot to HBO, and while we’ve never written a pilot before, we think now is a great time to move to a different city and try. Our dreams are coming true! Get ready for a shout out during award season, we know we’ll be winning one for something!”
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As of press time at least fifty-three winners of this year’s poll had announced their upcoming moves, and Lyric Opera, winner of “Best Opera Company,” posted that they had already signed for an apartment in Bushwick with Mayor Lori Lightfoot, winner “Best Elected Official,” and were working on a web series with Lightfoot “coming soon.”
