Can't Tango, Won't Fort

The plan was to keep Friday simple with fairies, food and film at the VMFA, only the drip was missing.

I barely made it to Amuse before the sun set, a shame given the wonderful western skyline visible through the wall of windows, but darkness is coming so early now.

Taking a seat at the end of the bar put me inches from where the absinthe drip should have been but wasn't.

An inquiry revealed that with the hordes descending for the "Hollywood Costume" exhibit, the drip was exiled for the sake of room for waiting customers.

I understood and I'm thrilled the show is so popular right out of the gate, but Amuse has got to understand that they're the ones who created green fairy junkies and they're the ones who've got to be able to feed those habits even now with the ruby slippers in residence.

Translation: they retrieved the drip from the kitchen and started one for me STAT, albeit not intravenously.

Well, that was a close one.

I moved down a stool to allow a fresh-faced trio to sit together and listened with amusement as they looked at the Hollywood-themed drink menu and began discussing alcohol.

The guy in the group said he wanted no part of the Lion's Roar, a cocktail of Old Overholt rye, Strega, Luxardo Maraschino, bitters, black peppercorn essence and Dolin dry vermouth.

Why not, you ask? Because it had vermouth.

"That was the first thing I stole from my parents' bar when I was sixteen and I drank the whole bottle," he said with clear distaste.

The bartender explained that A) it was undoubtedly cheap vermouth and B) vermouth, like wine, goes bad fairly quickly.

"You mean it doesn't have to taste like urine?" he asked earnestly, causing the bartender and I to exchange glances. What in the world?

"I wouldn't really know what urine tastes like. I don't think most people would," the bartender said diplomatically.

"Well, then you've never been in a frat house," he said, as if that explained everything.

I just took another sip of my absinthe drip and kept my eyes straight ahead.

For dinner I had a bowl of Tuscan kale and potato stew with house-made lamb sausage and two bites in, a server I know came over to tell me there was Billy bread in the house.

Now, I already had Amuse's superb herb focaccia in hand and thickly buttered, but she was thinking the Billy bread would be a better sopping vehicle with its crunchy crust. Right she was.

By the time the drip and stew were history, it was the bewitching hour for me to scuttle downstairs to the theater for the James River Shorts, an evening of the best of a juried competition for short form films.

On the way down, I heard about how fabulous my tights were and then stopped next to a security guard to admire the tangoing couples in the atrium below.

I have the tights, possibly even the legs, for the tango, but not the coordination.

Once in the Cheek theater, I found a good seat and settled in to be impressed.

"Anna Walks In" had a girl smoking (unconvincingly, I might add) and telling a strange story from her childhood in front of a clock that never changed time.

The audience laughed throughout "Return to the World of Dance," a parody about instructional dance videos.

This one taught the viewer how to make a post-modern dance with a few simple steps and their easy kit.

Just so you know, creating a manifesto was one of the steps, as was smearing butter on toast in one stroke.

"We will keep you posted on new developments in dance as they occur," the narrator intoned hilariously.

"Nitro" was the tragic story of a small town by that name in West Virginia's chemical valley (something I didn't know they had), which had been founded in 1919 and peaked in the '50s and '60s, with companies like Dow and Monsanto employing most of the town.

Using old footage, the film told the story of an explosion of Agent Orange which coated the town in the toxin, causing health problems ever since.

"Daybreak" was a series of animated drawings telling the story of a character laying in bed observing everything in his room - the cracks in the walls, the radiators, the windows- and the imaginary world he imagined through them.

The story ended with the character getting up to start his day, but the surprise came during the credits.

"This film was made on paper this size," it said, showing paper smaller than a Post-It.

"We're not kidding," the next frame read and showed a storyboard of dozens of little pieces of paper.

Knowing that now, I wanted them to restart the film so I could appreciate it all over again on a whole new level.

"Steak" took place in Richmond in a typical Fan-looking apartment with two guys who were convinced one of their roommates was a murderer.

On the plus side, he was cooking dinner for them.

When it became clear they needed to discuss the matter, one said, "Fort!" and they built one out of blankets in the living room so they could talk in privacy.

I'm inclined to think that only guys would yell "fort" to signify meeting time.

After a brief intermission, we saw the saddest film of the night and the one that took the People's Choice award, "Take Me Home," about a husband with a wife who had dementia.

The patient husband tries to accommodate her wishes but she clearly has no sense of reality, asking to go home whether she was at the nursing home or at home.

At the end, he erases her voice from their answering machine and replaces it with his own. Cue lump in throat.

And the soundtrack by Recluse Raccoon was a haunting accompaniment.

"Dwell Dig Shake" was the longest film by far at 29 minutes and told its black and white story in three parts.

The protagonist, an epileptic, finds an old VHS player in the trash and returns to his childhood home to dig up a time capsule he buried in 1998.

Back at home, he looks at a tape from the capsule made in 1995 showing him as a little boy. His roommate comes in and watches for a bit, commenting about the era.

"I miss the '90s," he whines. "Fatboy Slim and Nintendo 64 were the only good things about the '90s."

As if. A comment like that makes it easy to guess the age of the filmmaker.

The final film was "Puppy Dreams" about a high school girl trying to adjust to living with her Dad, finding out she has mono and that her friend is hot for a boy she once made out with.

The young actress playing the lead had a face you couldn't take your eyes off of and the film was one of three first prize winners tonight, along with "Anna" and "Daybreak."

Leaving the screening, everyone around me was talking about how fortunate we are to have the James River Film Society and events like this shorts competition.

Tell me something I don't know, people.

I made one last unplanned stop on my way home at my neighborhood joint, Bistro 27, for a nightcap.

Like last night, I had Graham's LBV 2008 porto, only this time with chocolate mousse and a Portuguese-speaking graduate student in broadcasting and journalism.

Asking me about my career path through radio, publishing and webcasts, he wondered how I'd gotten into broadcasting and journalism.

Not being particularly post-modern, I explained that I'd done it by going to school for art history.

I'm not kidding. You should see my storyboard.

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.