Bacon Days, Disco Nights

If you're going to wake up in the same condition you went to sleep, you'd better have a good lunch plan.

And I did.

I was meeting a friend to go to Arcadia and dish about men, restaurants and being pursued, topics we both had in common.

Friend was a tad disappointed to hear that I wouldn't be drinking with lunch as is our usual habit, but got no end of pleasure from the details of the night that put me in that dry place.

I insisted my friend go on with his plans for wine at lunch, and he happily conceded.

"Sorry you won't be joining me but glad to hear you're a bad girl sometimes," he observed with an evil grin.

Looking for a suitably satisfying day-after meal, I opted for the Arcadia club with fries, notable for the inclusion of real turkey (not deli meat) and thick-sliced duck bacon.

Our server seemed a bit nervous (new at this, are you?) but sweet and eager to please (flashing two thumbs up when describing the soup), replacing my very light fountain Coke with one more suitably dark since it came from a can.

We finished with a chocolate tartufo with "Arcadia" stenciled in cocoa powder on the plate while discussing disco and who knows what about it.

I could relate to his disdain for disco pretenders and their laughable idea of what those days were like.

Given my compromised state, I could talk disco but was only able to eat a couple bites of the tartufo, an unusually weak dessert effort for me.

After depositing him back at his restaurant, I moved on to the Second Tuesday Artwalk, also known as me finally making it to some of the gallery shows I'd missed by being at the museum last Friday instead of on Broad Street.

Candela Gallery had a show of Julio Mitchel's "Vintage Photographs" taken from the 60s through the 90s.

I found the most striking ones to be the older ones, of course, like the one of "Midget Movies, 3 Features, 5 cents each" with a man bending down to look through the slot-like viewer (peephole?) for his features.

Train imagery ran throughout and I always find scenes of them in the pre-Amtrack days fascinating for their window into a time when train travel was a true experience.

One photograph showed a Central train car and all eight windows framed a man reading the daily newspaper.

Eight men, eight papers, one shared habit.

Another showed the "bar car" of the train from the outside. In that one, a window framed men (what else?) drinking cocktails while another framed a black man in a white server's jacket mixing more.

There was a series of backstage pictures of cross-dressing men preparing for a drag show.

Beautifully made up faces with sassy hairdos sat on broad shoulders, narrow hips and, uh, banana hammocks.

One that required closer inspection was a fog-shrouded image on the water and at the picture's center was the Statue of Liberty, so small that it was almost unrecognizable in the mist.

A photograph of a brick wall with the words "Bar Entrance" and an arrow pointing down featured two men passed out against the wall.

Clearly they'd been through that entrance.

After Candela, I went over to Ghostprint Gallery to see George Pratt's paintings.

Painterly and colorful, they were at times impressionistic and showed a clear mastery of form.

I saw shades of Renoir in "Kristina" and "Angela," two pink-cheeked women who had been depicted in the most feminine manner, all soft colors and brushstrokes.

In "Haylee," the swirl of Pratt's brush suggested rather than depicted the woman and the room, except for one part.

The curve of her shoulder and arm was as pure a line drawing as could be done, not surprising for a man who is also a graphic novelist and illustrator.

"Dead Man" was the suggestion of a figure on the ground, not even close to fully formed, but completely evocative of the human body.

Dabs of bright red pigment coming from the head and shoulder remind the viewer of the subject's fate.

I found "Geisha with Mirror" to be the most representational piece with none of the impressions and dabs of paint of the rest of the show.

In "Country store" the paint had been applied to the canvas so thinly that its grain showed through, a marked contrast to the layers of paint on other canvases.

The show's final image, "Warming the Water" had a decidedly Manet-esque vibe with both the color palette and the exotic crouching figure suggesting the first Impressionist's style.

But just to remind the viewer that this is a 21st century work, there was an area near the woman's feet with an array of color splotches that were impossible to read as anything representational.

They looked to be there purely for the sake of adding color. Magnificently, I might add.

Walking back down Broad Street to go home after my mini artwalk, it occurred to me that I was no longer feeling the affects of last night's epic odyssey.

Just goes to show what the right lunch partner and a couple of excellent art shows can do to restore the equilibrium of sometimes bad girl.

And let's not ignore the obvious, either.

Bacon makes everything better.