Of Monsters and Men

Tonight there was good news and bad news.

The bad news came courtesy of the Paul Mellon lecture given by Dr. Gloria Groom at VMFA, "Manet: Fashion and Fetish."

Much of her talk was fascinating, about the key role the latest fashion played in Manet's work, even when it was absent like in the then-shocking "Dejeuner Sur L'herbe" where the men at the picnic wear suits and the women are naked.

Then there was his "Woman of 1866," a portrait of modern life with a woman dressed only in nightclothes but pictured with the oddest things.

A parrot. A man's monocle. A giant litter box. What the hell?

Manet used fashion as a pretext for experimentation, Groom claimed, so it wasn't about the weird stuff, it was about seeing a woman who'd been painted in her nightgown.

Ditto when he painted a woman in a corset with a man looking at her. a highly questionable scene.

So where's the problem with all this?

Manet believed in artifice, calling women in their natural state "monsters" because of the absence of make-up, hair dressing and clothing.

Apparently we aren't fit to look upon in our natural state.

Groom even admitted she agreed with this, but then, given her stylish clothes and make-up, I guess it wasn't surprising.

It did bring up a memory for me, though. Years ago, a boyfriend had looked at my face after our first sleepover and commented on how pale I was.

It was the first time he'd seen me without make-up and I guess the difference was apparently pretty dull.

Now I understand that he and Manet were in the same camp.

So there's a takeaway I certainly didn't expect from an art history lecture.

From there, my art-loving friend and I went to dinner at Bistro 27, aka my neighborhood joint, where we broke bad and sat at a table.

Music was absent, many of the tables around us were full and we had lots to catch up on.

We both started with tonight's soup, a creamy sausage and potato that was obscenely creamy but luckily the bubbles in my Prosecco helped cut the richness a bit.

While she told me about the wild ride she's been on the past week (I can't keep up with her dating schedule), we moved on to a beautifully medium-rare rack of lamb and ruby red trout with crawfish etouffe, both outstanding and both too big to finish.

While we gabbed about art and men, the dining room began to dwindle until the chef must have gotten bored because he came over to chat with us.

As usual, he began by accusing me of "cheating on him," which is how he refers to me eating at other restaurants, despite the fact that it's my job.

He didn't want to intrude on our girl talk, but by that time we were ready for the last course, so we insisted he stay.

With our chocolate hazelnut torte, we had Graham's LBV 2008 Porto because Chef Carlos recommended it as young and figgy (descriptors that could have been used for me at one point) and if you can't trust a man speaking Portuguese about Port, well, who can you trust?

Finally too full to even sit there and gab any more, we parted company and I went to Balliceaux for music.

New York band Matuto, playing something they call Brazilian redneck music (I probably should have brought the Brazilian chef) was into their first song when I arrived.

With an accordion player, a guitar player, bass player, drummer and percussionist, their sound was part Brazilian folk, part bluegrass, part roots music and part swamp jams, especially when the killer accordion player got going.

I immediately saw a shy musician friend near the bar and teased her about being out on a work night, but we agreed the band was too good to miss.

Before long I ran into my former neighbor, the councilman, the jazz critic from last night and lots of musicians who knew enough not to miss a band the U.S. State department has dubbed American music ambassadors and sent touring all over the world.

By the end of the second song, people were dancing like crazy in front of the stage, including a group of four women who had clearly come solely for that purpose.

I took my place just behind them, a more discrete place to shake my stuff.

That's when the band gave us the good news. "The more you dance, the better we play!"

Well that was a win-win situation and from then on we only made them play magniificently.

At one point, the percussionist was coaxing unbelievable sounds out of his tambourine and a woman in front of me turned around accusingly and asked, "Did you see that?"

I had, but I still didn't understand what I'd seen despite being amazed at what I was hearing, so I went back to shaking it.

Meanwhile, there was the tall Italian guy who kept grabbing different women to dance with, the guy in white shoes and red and white polka-dot tie who alternated taking pictures and dancing and the guy who danced so frenetically you had to watch out for his flailing limbs.

Not that there's anything wrong with any of that because everyone was having a blast.

The percussionist did a solo where we saw him work his tambourines like drums, eliciting sounds with wet fingers and subtle shaking and causing people to gather around him to get a closer look.

The accordion player, he of the mischievous eyes, also did a solo, his sweat-soaked shirt getting even wetter as he tore up the accordion and the crowd went crazy.

"Can we finish up with  a big, synergistic moment with the people of Richmond and Matuto?" the singer/guitarist asked.

We all gathered  together so he could snap a few pictures of us all, no doubt to add to their globe-trotting scrapbook.

They did a drawing for a free CD and the guy who won, the frenetic, flailing one, asked if he could dance onstage for the next song.

As if Matuto would deny someone their right to dance.

That said, he almost took off the bass player's head at one point, but at least he was having fun.

Midway through the last song, the guitarist yelled, "When you dance, I get a knot in my belly."

It's an evocative phrase, isn't it?

As a woman, I may be a monster in my natural state but if I can, chances are I'm going to do what it takes to cause a knot in a man's belly.

Sometimes it's dancing and sometimes, well, that depends on the man.