You Make the Call

Our birthday party group had mixed feelings about it. Was it incredibly strange or charming in an offbeat way?

Suppose you were sitting in a restaurant and along about 10:30ish, maybe 11:00, a guy sitting in one of the front booths pulls out a guitar from under the table and starts playing. As he's sitting in the booth. Plates still on the table. With his female companion across the booth from him. Maybe he even sings softly a little. Weird or wonderful?

The evening started innocuously enough at Pescado's China Street with an overdue happy hour with a girlfriend. We enjoyed the deals on wine and appetizers (shrimp nachos, tomato and fennel mussels), did the usual socializing with one of the owners and tried to cover all the personal ground since our last get-together three weeks ago.

For a change, I even had contributions to make to the "what's new in your personal life?" portion of the conversation. As always, we share everything with each other (okay, almost everything), based on our long-time friendship and understanding of each another's needs. And, probably, general nosiness, too. I'll make you feel better about your life by telling you about mine. Deal.

But also as always, she has a significant other waiting at home for her and the talking ends when she asks what else I'm doing for the evening. Sigh. Not what she has planned, that's for sure.

Kate Duffy's new show at Column B Gallery at Chop Suey was entitled Three-Oh! An Early Onset of Midlife Crisis, surely a title ripe for interpretation and commentary (if 30 is the new midlife, I have a few things to say on the subject). The accessibility and appeal of the drawings was clear by the time I arrived late in the opening; easily three quarters of the pieces had already been sold.

Had I been of a mind to buy a piece (and I wasn't, having just this week hung two new pieces on my walls), my choice had already been earmarked for someone else's collection, so it wouldn't have mattered. But it pleased me to see that she'd done so well already. Even in a recession, it's good to know that people still choose to spend money on local art.

My evening was due to culminate at a birthday dinner for a friend at Zeus and I was the last to arrive. The group was well entrenched at the bar, with one bottle of wine already history, so I dove right in to the second bottle and the conversation.

I've mentioned before how friends who read my blog use it as a starting point to dig for further information when they see me and such was the case tonight. A friend immediately pulled me aside, asking "So who was it you went to the beach with and how do you know them?" That wasn't all he asked, either.

I found out from a friend what it will take before he marries his delightful girlfriend (fortunately, she already knows). We had a discussion about how soon a guy should call after a date (I sided with the male opinion on this one, but then I'm not a phone person).

Like with any group eating endeavor, there was much sharing, so I got to enjoy the braised veal and pasta special, the beef tenderloin meatloaf, the Tasso ham grits, the beef carpaccio and whatever else I was offered, being the equal opportunity eater that I am.

And then there was the guitar guy who began strumming away just before we indulged in cake and ice cream, birthday singing, lit candles and picture-taking. One of our group who was especially unimpressed with the impromptu performance went over and asked the guy's girlfriend what in the world he was doing.

"Oh, he does this at Arby's, too," she explained nonsensically.

"Arby's is a Yugo and this place is a Maserati," my friend retorted, making a poor wine-influenced analogy, but it didn't change anything. Our waitress was as baffled and put off by it as some in our group.

But the birthday girl liked it and said so to the rest of us. And the other booth patrons were drifting out into the night, until it was just us and one other group in the side room and they couldn't hear him.

Eventually guitar guy gave up, packed up and took his show on the road. Or home, more likely.

The romantic in me wants to think that he was going to do a private performance for the adoring girlfriend. And that's great.

It's the PDG (public display of guitar) that seemed somehow inappropriate, especially in such a tiny restaurant. And that's coming from a music lover.

My preference would be to keep it in the case, friend. At least until you're in private.

Or at Arby's.