Woe is Me, All Hope is Gone.

I missed out on art and music for the sake of meeting up with friends whom I hadn't seen in a while.

Agreeing to see my long-absent friends put me at Rowland for dinner instead of at the Visual Arts Center or Ballcecaux.

Compensation came  in the form of a guy whose house was to be used for the filming of "Lincoln" and also satisfied my need for stranger conversation.

Moving down to give our group room at the bar, he told me about the film crew renting his Monument Avenue house for filming.

What did I learn? Daniel Day Lewis is a method actor who insists on staying in character.

He makes the crew refer to him as "Mr. Lincoln" at all times and during breaks, he sits on a cot like the Great Emancipator would have.

It made me wonder if he also adopts the symptoms of Marfan's syndrome and pretends to have a crazy wife,

Justifying that interaction as my culture for the evening, I resolved to enjoy my choice to get down with friends.

To celebrate getting together, we decided to go festive with multiple bottles of the crispy, dry Lamrac Prosecco.

Dinner was just as good: lump blue crab cake with roasted fennel, tomato ragout and sauce Choron ( a Bearnaise tinted pink with tomato) and Bavette Steak au Poivre over autumn root veggies with Porcini sherry reduction.

Interestingly enough, I had just learned about the bavette cut at the butcher party I attended a couple of nights ago. A variation of flank steak, it's a popular choice of French chefs.

How unexpected (and fitting) that I got to taste it tonight.

I love this time of year for crabs because they're plentiful and meaty and the crab cake was exactly that.

The bavette was out of this world: rare, toothsome and flavorful. As usual, the French know what they're doing with food.

We watched as an inexperienced bartender made shots for a group of girls ("I think I'll call it...the "Thanksgiving" he improvised).

One of our group had just returned from a seminar in Virginia Beach and told us about Pat Robertson's restaurant, the Swan Terrace.

He was as surprised at its Wine Spectator award as the absence of hard liquor.

He was almost as impressed with the chocolate bomb dessert as with a girl named Jill who looked like Wonder Woman.

After a dessert of two Derby chocolate pie slices shared by all, we got down to the lowest common denominator of the evening, music.

The chef and one of my friends commandeered the music to serenade us endlessly with the Byrds. I didn't complain because I'm such a fan of the twelve-string.

Some air guitar songs were so entertaining that video was shot.

But obviously not by me. It was enough that I agreed to carry a hypothetical cell phone if a future boyfriend ever asked me to (assuming that he was the only one with the number).

We talked about couples who stop on the side of I-95 to have sex (it's true) and boyfriends who show their love by taking their girlfriend's sinks (ditto).

Despite aspiring to such tales, I avoid I-95 like the plague and I have no spare sinks.

Perhaps I can Method act my way out of this.