The darnedest blogs.

According to the weather wizards, the Wednesday-Thursday storm was the most intense in many months, including tens of thousands of lightning bolts, and more than three inches of rain in DuPage and surrounding counties.

Art Linkletter was able to make profitable hay out of the “darnedest” things. I prefer it when kids say the surrealist things.

Last Sunday I was the helper in Lilly’s Sunday school class, a pre-K/K gang of a half-dozen or so kids, as I am about once a month. Sometimes the helper is called on to help the teacher with tasks that require two adults, but mostly he sits around, reflecting that he could never teach a class of children this young. I do that, anyway; I can’t speak for the other helpers.

At one point the kids were making Play-Dough crosses, the stone in front of the tomb, and other items relevant to the Resurrection, which was under discussion on this first Sunday after Easter. One little boy, while processing the story according to his own lights, rolled his clay into a long cylinder. “Some very, very bad men made Jesus into a hot dog,” he said.

After church and Sunday school, we hit the road briefly again, this time skirting the western suburbs and then heading northwest, with Rockford as the goal. Rockford is actually a sizable city, about 150,000 — making it the second-largest city in Illinois, with Aurora and Naperville next at over 100,000 — though when Yuriko asked me what the main business was there, I was stumped. Formerly industrial, would be my guess. And now? It turns out that companies still do make things there, such as aerospace components, screws and fasteners, machine tools and environmental controls. These are the kind of manufactures that are invisible to the everyday world, since you can’t pick up a mess o’ aerospace components at Wal-Mart. But in fact the largest employers are the local school district and several area hospitals.

The town is big enough to support the Rockford Symphony Orchestra, which calls the downtown Coronado Theatre home. Last fall, I found out that the RSO was giving a children’s concert there, and I set my sites on it, partly as part of Lilly’s ongoing education on Things Out in the World, partly for my own satisfaction of seeing that theater. It’s a theater in the old style, a movie palace of the 1920s, which I’d read was newly renovated.

The overall impression inside the Coronado is of velvet seats and gilt above. More gilding than your eye knows to do with, and the more you look at it, the less thematic it becomes. Apparently, it was designed to be eclectic.

A capsule description from the theater’s Web site: “The Coronado Theatre, Rockford's ‘Wonder Theatre,’ was originally built in 1927 as a movie house and vaudeville theatre. [It] is a classic example of the ‘atmospheric style,’ featuring a mixture of Spanish castles, Italian villas, Oriental dragons and gold-encrusted figures. The theatre recently underwent an 18-month, $18.5 million renovation and expansion. The Coronado Theatre re-opened its doors in January, 2001....”

“Atmospheric style,” eh? Whatever the architect felt like throwing in. But on the whole, it’s a good effect. Frederic Klein was the architect, about whom a search — an admittedly cursory one — reveals that he’s also known for some bungalows in Peoria. He’s not in my “AIA Guide to Chicago,” so he either did no work around here, or isn’t remembered for it. But surely it’s enough to have designed one fine movie palace that, unlike so many others, has survived into the 21st century. Most people don’t even get that small measure of posthumous fame.