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.

I Would Walk 800 Miles

After ten days of holiday celebrating and vacationing, today was just another day in the life.

Put on some "Undeniably Mauve" lipstick, go for a walk and put your life in gear again.

I finally got back to working, interviewing a curator, scheduling another with a musician tomorrow and taking my hired mouth out for a meal.

Eating alone has its distinct pleasures, none more so than listening to and/or joining the conversations of strangers and tonight I lucked into a couple of good ones.

When one of the guys mentioned a band he used to be in back in the day, the other guy knew the bass player of that band and within minutes they were doing the back and forth to determine possible shared friends.

They threw out the names of lots of former local bands (Modern Groove Syndicate being one of the few I recognized) before segueing into stories about the glory days.

You know, the '80s.

One guy shared how he'd bought a '50s Jeep ("Left over from the Korean war") back in his heyday and done all kinds of irresponsible things with it.

One story was about how he'd left Sidewalk Cafe and driven home on the sidewalks all the way. Get it? He seemed to think this was hilarious.

But the coup de gras was how he'd offered this girl a ride home in his jeep after a long night of drinking at the old Bogart's ("I wasn't drunk, really!") and how on the way there, she'd fallen out of the Jeep.

"Wait, was her name Jennifer?" the other guy asked mid-story, as if he recalled a Jennifer falling out of a Jeep 30 years ago.

"No, man, no," Jeep guy said, eager to finish. "So she falls out and I have to pull over and yank her back in, right in front of a cop car to get her home."

The other guy nods in appreciation.

"Yea, those were the days, back when a girl could fall out of your Jeep and the cops didn't give a shit. Man, I loved the '80s."

I couldn't have ordered better entertainment.

When I left it was for the VMFA to hear the Mary Hermann Garcia Group, notable because the band's trombone and percussionist was Antonio Garcia, director of the Jazz Studies program at VCU.

Conveniently, he seems to have fallen in love with and married a singer for his quartet and tonight they were playing sambas, bossa novas and standards at the Jazz cafe.

Thinking that between New Year's eve and the rainy evening it would be a slow night for jazz, I was immediately proven wrong when I got to Best cafe to find the room mobbed, leaving standing room only.

Standing where I at least had a good view of the band, Mary said it was their last song before a break. "Our last song is 'Lover Come Back," she said sweetly.

"And I'm going to play it faster than I have a right to," Antonio said with a big grin and damned if he didn't do just that.

I soon saw a familiar face when a J-Ward neighbor walked by on the way to score a second round for her and her husband. "We've got an extra chair at our table, come join us," she invited.

On the way to their table, I saw one of the No BS guys, no doubt there because he came out of VCU under Antonio's tutelage. At another I saw a couple dressed to the nines with her was in a strapless gown, no less.

Besides the expected husband, another couple was at the table when I got there and the woman scrutinized me before saying, "We've met, maybe at Balliceaux? You're the blogger."

Good memory. She and her husband live in Carver, so it was a table of neighbors, albeit not intentionally.

But since we'd all been in the neighborhoods for seven-plus years, it was only natural that we got off talking about the changes we'd seen over the years.

In rapid order, we discussed the influx of students (both VCU and MCV), the hope that Whole Foods does buy the old Sears building, how our Kroger could use a better cheese selection and what everyone thought of Max's and Lucy's, our two newest eateries.

With samba music playing, I looked outside to see rain falling on the reflecting pool and around Chihuly's red reeds, the ones the VMFA recently bought for our own (hooray!) and thought how lucky we are to have this lovely place to hang out in any Thursday and Friday evening we care to.

But then the art geek in me kicked in and rather than stay for the third set, I wanted to go upstairs and see "Clare Leighton: From Pencil to Proof to Press," an exhibit of drawings, woodcuts, posters and even a porcelain piece.

I had the focus gallery to myself, at least until the gowned woman and her date strolled in, but they seemed less interested in art than each other and soon abandoned me for a more private gallery.

As a reader, I loved seeing some of the illustrations Leighton did for Thomas Hardy's book, "The Return of the Native," even more impressive when seen in a first edition copy of the book under glass.

Talk about a nerd's wet dream - rare book plus art after music. Thanks, Thursday.

I read where Leighton traveled to Dorset, the book's setting, to get a feel for the heaths where the book was set before she drew them.

Nice research trip if you can get it.

There were two watercolors, both delicately exquisite, the colors soft and inviting and a couple of pieces she'd done in New England, one of "Clam Diggers" and another of "Lobstering," done on a porcelain plate.

My favorite was a poster for "Week End Walks. 800 miles of these in London's country," advertising a set of three books, "Available at station bookstalls."

Bookstalls, now that's a wonderfully antiquated word.

Apparently Leighton did a fair amount of posters because she felt there was no distinction between fine art and commercial art and that art should be available through all different modes of production.

Amen to that or we economically-challenged would never have a shot at owning any.

Likewise, she was an artist who participated in subscription print clubs, an idea first conceived of in the mid-19th century and revived during the Depression to promote the affordability of prints and help artists make a living.

Clubs commissioned limited edition prints from artists for subscribers. Voila! The democratization of art.

Just one more piece of brilliance put into play during an economic downturn to help the creative class continue to eat, stay warm and sleep indoors. Count me as a full supporter.

In my favorite "only a woman" moment, there was a print called "The Baptising" done in 1952 when Leighton traveled through the south to get ideas for a series of illustrations.

Coming upon a scene of people gathered around a woman holding a baby standing in the river with a minister on a hot August Sunday, Clare did what any self-respecting artist caught pencil-less would do.

She pulled out her lipstick and a scrap of old paper and put down a sketch of the scene which she turned into the engraving in front of me months later.

Never underestimate the uses of lipstick. Or find yourself out without it.

Just in case you're lucky enough that a man whisks you off to a gallery where it ends up on him instead of you.

Undeniably one of my goals.