Chopsticks and Gibson Guitars

I love a rainy day, especially when it's 60+ degrees and mere days ago it was 12.

So when I wake up to a message from a friend asking, "What do you think of dim sum?" when he knows perfectly well I can spend hours grazing off a good cart, I get my wet and wild walk out of the way tout de suite so we can commence chowing down.

Suggesting I meet him at his house so we can drive together, a technical necessity since I don't know where we're going, I arrive expecting to hit the road, but no, he wants to show off his latest project.

He and a carpenter friend have been building the most magnificent wraparound porch onto his house for years now and it's finally finished and he wants to show another porch-lover the fruits of his labor.

I am in awe.

The multi-level porch wraps around two sides of the house, has cypress railings, some scavenged from a house on Franklin Street decades ago and the rest copies of those (also in cypress) and six green, enamel hanging lights made in the Pacific northwest.

I find it particularly charming that birds have already made two nests on top of the nearly two-story high ceiling rafters, all the more so when my friend informs me that he intends to leave them there.

It is a splendid porch although if it were mine, I would have screened it in. But that's me.

On our way out of the house, I notice the black, rotary-dial phone hanging on the kitchen wall and he tells me many of the rooms have rotary dial phones, a conscious choice since he owns an iPhone.

No surprise, eccentric people attract eccentric friends.

Our destination turns out to be Queen's Dim Sum, a place past Glenside on Broad Street, far out of my purview.

So far beyond it that I had no idea that the K-Mart at Glenside has apparently been a flooring store for years.

But my friend is raving about Queen's and on arrival, we find we are the only non-Asian people in the room, always a good sign.

Our backsides barely hit the banquette before a tiny woman with limited English has wheeled the dim sum cart to our table and is offering up tasty-looking things.

Har gaw- steam shrimp dumplings- get us started and in quick order we get pork buns, deep fried taro and meat dumplings, using the crunchy bits that fall off as a dredge for other things, bright pink thinly-sliced pork, meat and shrimp dumplings, tiny ribs and goodness knows what else I've forgotten.

The cart keeps coming around and we keep pointing and ordering as if we are bottomless, which it turns out we're not.

Friend and I groan over the poor choice of music -pure classic rock- with tired songs by Steve Miller, 38 Special and Loverboy. Oh, it's bad.

A young Asian girl comes by to check on our progress and when we rave about the food, she gives us the traditional Chinese thumbs-up and says, "Awesome!"

By now the rain has started back up in earnest, but we force ourselves to read our fortunes (Mine: be a thoughtful friend and a generous enemy) and head out into the monsoon.

After he drops me at my car and heads inside to spend the rest of the evening with a book listening to the rain on his new tin roof, I make my way to the Criterion to meet another friend and finally see "Inside Llewyn Davis," a film that opened a month ago and is just now getting to Richmond.

Given Richmond's vibrant folk scene, I was curious to learn more about the roots of the music I get to hear so much around here.

Whether others felt the same or it was just people eager to see the latest Coen brothers film, the theater quickly filled every seat.

From the opening scene where the Davis character is allowed to sing an entire song instead of the usual ADD-quick snippet moviegoers seem to prefer now, it's clear that this is a grown-up Coen brothers movie.

Just as good is how all the characters actually sing their songs in the movie so there's no embarrassing lip-synching like in so many movies about music.

As a fan of cultural history, I was fascinated by the Coens' snapshot of Greenwich Village circa 1961.

Women wear cat-eye glasses and badly teased hair-dos. Men wear suits to dinner parties and watch their language around the womenfolk.

I'd read that the Coens had said that if they hadn't found Oscar Isaac to play Llewyn, they wouldn't have made the movie and it was clear why.

Inhabiting the character of a folk singer out of step with the new folk era, he was so compelling in the role that now I need to know more about the actual singer his character was based on - David Van Ronk.

And wouldn't you just know, as I listened to the songs of the "old folk" sound about to be replaced with the zeitgeist that was Bob Dylan, it sounded so honest, so genuine, so familiar...kind like Richmond's own Jonathan Vassar.

What goes around comes around.

Leave it to Richmond to take 50 years to do it.