Can't Be Sporty

The only thing about taking vacation is post-vacation.

I'm not talking about adjusting to the three-hour time difference, although it hasn't been easy. I went to bed at midnight last night only to discover that my body thought it was 9:00 Portland time. Let's just say by the time I finally fell asleep, it was well after 3 a.m. and I'd done nothing fun to show for that time.

I've got no problem with late nights, but I expect escapades in trade.

I'm not even talking about the inevitable unpacking, laundry, plant watering and grocery shopping required after you've been away from home all but one of the last ten days.

No, the biggest adjustment is shifting out of vacation mode and back into real life. For me, that means running errands, finally answering work e-mails and diving back into my social calendar.

It also means catching up on over a week's worth of Washington Posts left by my intrepid delivery guy who continues to make a stop here even when I've notified him I'm out of town. Unlike the rest of the world, when I go on vacation, I stop paying attention to the larger world to focus on fun.

Sure, now that I'm back, I see that Greece is in deep doo-doo, read the gruesome details of the latest North Carolina shark attack and learned that it's now okay to take pictures on White House tours, long verboten. With any luck, I'll get to today's newspaper before going to bed tonight.

But what I also needed was friends and the Silent Music Revival at Gallery 5 offered me that. I got barely a block away when I first saw lightening and turned around and walked home for an umbrella before proceeding. Turns out I didn't need it, but the sidewalks were wet by the time I got out, so it did happen even if I didn't see it.

The first friend I ran into shared the latest on the house she and her partner are rehabbing slowly but surely. Boards have been removed from windows so glass and caulking can make them usable. The hydrangea I'd given her for her birthday had been planted and is blooming.

They'd collected a wood-burning stove and claw foot tub from her grandmother's house, all the more impressive because the tub will be an outdoor tub, which may be the coolest thing I've heard of in a while. Sure, I've got my own claw foot tub but it's in that most mundane of places, the bathroom.

Jameson, the organizer of the event and always the supremely serene type, was tonight a bit keyed up because it had been one mishap after another preparing for tonight.

First he hadn't been able to locate tonight's feature, "Say Ah-h!" because it was in storage in northern Virginia. Attempting to download it, his computer had been infected with a virus. Then Gallery 5's projector was on the fritz. Somehow, he'd sorted all this out and while we were now seeing another film, at least he hadn't had to cancel.

It was the first time I'd seen the teacher/music fan who'd just spent five weeks in Europe, bouncing around between Germany, Romania (Transylvania, natch), Austria and Italy. A devoted metal-head, I wasn't at all surprised to hear about the multi-day music festival he'd attended (we compared notes on Strand of Oaks since I'd seen them here while he'd seen them there).

But I couldn't have been more surprised to hear that he and his main squeeze had taken a four-hour "Sound of Music" bicycle tour in Salzburg. The funny part was that he'd never even seen the movie until deciding to book the tour, so he'd watched it just before going abroad. He got to see it all  - the von Trapp mansion, the abbey and cemetery, the town - except the mountain where Maria sings to the hills. Seems that hill is in Berlin, not Salzburg. Who knew?

Tonight's crowd for the music and film was smaller than usual, probably because of the holiday weekend or even the impending rain, so I had no problem scoring a front row seat.

Instead of one film, we were seeing a bunch of animated shorts from 1907-11, created by Frenchman Emile Cohl, whom Jameson said was the first to use pen and ink drawings for animation. The earliest were white figures on a black background (meaning negatives), eventually giving way to black figures on a white background.

Providing tonight's soundtrack were DJ Harrison for the first set and DJ Ohbliv for the second, both hidden behind the movie screen. Their seamless mashups of song snippets were an ideal match for the fast-moving action in shorts such as "Affair of the Heart" with characters with hearts for heads and faces, "Art's Infancy" and "Mr. Crack" based on an operetta about Baron Munchausen.

More people arrived and a few left during the break, while I ran into a guy I'd met a few years ago and hadn't seen at all in the past year. I'm always surprised when people remember me after so much time.

The last half of the program was later work by Cohl, much of it foreshadowing the work of the surrealist and avant garde film makers of coming decades. More plot driven, they also featured much more of a mix of live action and drawn animation.

Mothers-in-law seemed to be a recurring theme, always drawn as hideous old hags with bad teeth and menacing eyes. "Let's Be Sporty" began with a figure trying to ride a horse, then drive an automobile, ride a bike and ice skate. "Nothing beats walking!" it seemed to conclude, but, walking was bested by jumping, a movement not easily captured at this stage of animation.

When the show ended, Ohbliv kept playing and Jameson queried the group, "One more?" which got him a rousing affirmative from the crowd in the room.

"The Mind of a Cafe Worker" began with a table of men drinking in a restaurant while the tired server slumped in a nearby chair (at least he wasn't on his cell phone). Once he fell asleep and began dreaming, it was about wine...and beer...and absinthe, fanciful bottles showering him in alcohol, so happy dreams. He awoke only because his patrons were squirting seltzer water bottles at him, laughing at him as the crowd laughed at them.

Classic silent films about walking and absinthe, two things I know a little about. Not a bad way to ease back into my Richmond life.