She'll Go Her Way and I'll Go Mine

Me and my married friends, we got a thing going on.

Or perhaps I should say several things, since I had more than one date tonight, although can you really have too many dates in one night?

Given today's significance, it being national Pi day and all, my first was a pie date at Garnett's. Except I opted for cake. Coconut cake, my favorite.

But my fetching date had pie, along with loads of good Twitter gossip, details of her latest endeavor and a request for my mad Home Ec skills.

WPA's baker David stopped by, dropping off cakes and pies, and sheepishly admitting that he'd forgotten it was national Pi day. He must not have as many nerdy science friends as I do because it was impossible to miss in my feed, where mathematical jokes abounded.

You know what my favorite thing about Pi is? It goes on and on...

She and I spent the late afternoon chatting about people with a sense of entitlement, whose got talent in this town and where our next lunch date will be.

While the jukebox (okay, Pandora) plays our favorite songs.

We have to be clandestine about it so her husband doesn't find out.

In fact, it was when he texted her asking, "Are you coming home soon?" that we knew our "Me and Mrs. Jones"  moments were over and it was time for her to go her way and me to go mine.

She might not have been so quick to let me go had she known I was on my way to meet another married woman, only this time it was for drinks, not sweets.

When that wife had told me she wanted to meet up, I'd suggested Amuse, saying "Assuming you want to drink in a museum filled with fabulous art."

Her response, "As if I could pass THAT up...xxoox." Of course, I didn't want her to pass that up.

We both know that it's wrong, but it's much too strong to let cool down.

Arriving at the VMFA's Boulevard entrance just as my date did, we walked into the museum and upstairs to Amuse together.

Wisely, we'd chosen to meet early and not just early, but early on the first week after the time change, so the bar was abandoned with barely a few tables occupied.

We were a study in contrasting seasons, she bundled up as if just back from the Yukon and ordering a chewy red wine and me coat-less and clamoring for Thurston Wolfe Rose, a deep pink charmer that got the bartender talking about the next big pink thing.

She posited that white zinfandel, that overly sweet staple of the '80s, was going to become the winemakers' new darling grape, massaged and reworked into something hip and decidedly not cloying.

It is after all, she pointed out, the zinfandel grape, a lovely thing when bottled appropriately.

From our bar position, we kept an eye on the sun, watching it illuminate the bare trees in the sculpture garden from behind while the staff lamented how no one wants to think about going out to eat when it's this light out.

If you think it's bad now, kids, wait until June.

Over curry fried oysters, we watched as the bartending staff worked on concocting the new spring cocktail menu, stressing that creation comes first and naming last.

My drinks date wanted to talk theater - "Death and the Maiden," "Rocky Horror Picture Show"- while I wanted to hear about what's been going on in her life.

As you might expect, her husband came up in conversation more than a few times, but what date really wants to hear about the "other man"?

Ending our tryst on a sweet note was a no-brainer when our server rhapsodized about the new dessert, a chocolate peanut butter terrine, telling us no other chocolate options would do.

On occasion, I like to let someone else be the boss of me.

Eventually I lured her away from the bar crowd to see the "Ryan McGinness: Studio Visit" exhibit, especially fascinating for her because she's an artist herself.

I now because she's invited me to her studio before to see her etchings, if you get my drift.

But where I won her undying affection (if I didn't have it already) was when I led her to the "Clare Leighton: From Pencil to Proof to Press" show, sure she'd fall in love with it just as I had.

Did she ever! As if proof of our compatibility was required, she was immediately charmed by my two favorites, the poster for "Week End Walks. 800 miles of these in London's country" advertising a set of books and a 1952 print called "The Baptizing" done when Leighton came upon a scene of a minister and people gathered around a woman holding a baby in the river on a hot August Sunday.

My darling date, an illustrator, was entranced reading how Clare had done what any self-respecting artist caught pencil-less would do - pull out her lipstick and a scrap of old paper and put down a sketch of the scene which she turned into the engraving months later.

We said our fond farewells on the bricks along the Boulevard, promising not to wait too long to meet up again.

Finding it tough to spend the rest of the evening alone after such splendid company times two, I ended up at the Westhampton Theater with six other people to see "Tim's Vermeer," a documentary about a man obsessed with proving how the 17th century painter Vermeer achieved photographic-like realism long before the invention of photography.

Watching Tim, an inventor, take 213 days to recreate the room Vermeer painted in "The Music Lesson" by hand means we see him making glass for the windows, fashioning picture frames and crafting chair legs on a lathe he eventually cuts in half to accommodate the necessary length of the harpsichord leg, a process that seems endless and painstaking.

But that's nothing compared to the process of him painting an exact copy of the room using a mirror as an optical device the way he believes Vermeer had.

This is a man with absolutely no artistic training, mind you.

As an art history geek of the highest order, and someone who got to see an extraordinary, once in a lifetime Vermeer show in Rome in 2012, I was thrilled just to see close ups of many of the works I'd seen at that show.

By the end of the film, when Tim gets choked up looking at the finally finished Vermeer, all I could think was what a testament to his passion for the project it was, all 1825 days of it.

What it came down to is that there is no difference between an artist and a scientist and both require a lot of slow, hard work to succeed. Plainly put, there's always been some kind of technology involved in art, as long as man has indulged his creative spirit.

I only wish I'd had someone's wife to discuss the film with when the lights came up, but my lovely dates were home with their husbands.

We gotta be extra careful
That we don't build our hopes up too high
Cause she's got her own obligations and so do I

Me and my Mrs., Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Jones. We got a thing or two going on.