A Bright, Willful, Curious Woman

Mining the record collection of my youth continues to be absolutely fascinating.

Apparently a young woman couldn't have too much Joan Armatrading, or maybe that was just me, while "Wings Over America" doesn't hold up nearly as well as I'd have expected. Luther Vandross on the other hand, well, Luther is timeless.

But the real gem was a Bill Conti soundtrack album to Paul Mazursky's 1978 film "An Unmarried Woman," all the more dated for the notation on the album that says, "Also available on 20th Century Fox Stereo Tapes."

Wow, I don't even know if that means 8 track or cassette given the era.

Coming across it in my stacks was a kick, not just because the movie had been such a big deal for me (and scores of other young women at the time), but because inside the record sleeve was a calendar page dated "Tuesday May 23, 1978."

Why I stuck that in there, I have no clue, other than that date - my birthday - was two months after the release of the film so perhaps I thought there was some cosmic connection.

This was, after all, not only my introduction to the hunky Englishman Alan Bates (and hearing him describe our heroine as "a bright, willful, curious woman" surely one of the finest compliments my young ears had ever heard directed at my sex) but a film that laid out in no uncertain terms that life without a partner was not only okay, but preferable in some ways.

Attention, kids: hard as it is to believe, this was a revolutionary notion at the time.

Although my then-boyfriend Curt liked to mock me about the movie's message by parroting Lily Tomlin's feminist catch phrase, "Right on, Sister Boogie Woman," the movie did have a huge impact on how I thought of relationships and what was expected of me in one.

All of a sudden, I was remembering how empowered "An Unmarried Woman" made me feel. None of which I expected when it came up next on the turntable rotation.

But I only got around to pulling out records to listen to after a soggy walk and a busy day researching and writing. At that point, my evening plans were nebulous at best until, voila!, I was offered a lifeline.

Do you have plans for dinner this evening? I can't stay out late but would enjoy company if you are available.

Sure, there was comedy happening and, yes, I'd found some live music, but neither comes close to a human who wants to share food and conversation, so I wasted little time in accepting the invitation despite the rain.

After all, I don't melt, despite the presumption in an email I came home to find from a weather wimp friend saying, "I assume you are out doing your thing. Pretty adventurous of you in this miserable weather." Is it?

We were far from the only adventurous souls who landed at Nota Bene where it was unexpectedly Date Night, so we played along, taking seats at the bar because the few open tables in the lively room were reserved and soon filled.

Almost immediately I heard my name called by a beer rep enjoying date night with her Dad while her husband is off in France drinking wine and missing her. As she pointed out, where better to be this wet night than in the cozy, wine and fire-warmed confines of Nota Bene?

Already, several items on the specials board had an "X" next to them, meaning they weren't meant to be for us, so we turned our attention to the plethora of menus for consideration.

Before long, we were joined at the bar by a trio of women who sat down, ordered and basically never shut up until they left. My friend was seated next to them, making it easier for him to overhear them than it was for me, but, as we learned later, one had been eavesdropping on us the entire time, concluding that we were, in fact, on a date.

Isn't everyone on a date when it's date night?

Our personable server delivered a bottle of Loire Valley Chardonnay along with a salad of mixed greens and herbs as we dove into dinner and recaps of our inner and outer lives since last we'd met.

Of paramount importance was establishing how much guilt was involved with tonight's rendezvous.

Only once our two pizzas - a classic Margherita and Pizza Tonight's standard-bearer, the fig and pig - showed up did we approach tonight's headlining topic of discourse, which had been pre-determined last Friday during a rescheduling of plans.

What, everyone doesn't designate a conversational topic days in advance?

Luckily, neither of us is so straight-laced we couldn't digress. I voted for the personality of Route 460 over the soul sucking of I-64 for his trip eastward tomorrow. He looked to me for restaurant recommendations down that way.

We compared thoughts on the new T-Pot bridge and I shared my personal back story on T Pot himself. When he described a cheesy '80s cover band he'd recently seen in the West end, I tried to suss out if it was the one I know and have seen in the east and west ends.

Curious about the ink arising from our server's shirt, I inquired and she graciously displayed the tattoo of a bat hanging upside down between her breasts before discussing the merits of almond brittle on chestnut honey panna cotta over the alternative, almond cake.

She may be no fan of nut brittle, but I am, so we chose brittle-covered pudding - the honey notes on the finish came across like a sunny, summer day on the palate - for our final course.

Well, not our final final course because that was Virginia whiskey and Mexican tequila - small cubes, both - as we lingered long enough to be the final guests in a restaurant so warm I was able to remove my sweater, a rarity for me.

Sort of like a rare last-minute Tuesday non-date. Right on, Sister Boogie Woman.

The Heart Wants What It Wants

The best relationships are the ones you never saw coming.

Clocking in at 3 1/2 hours from start to finish, tonight might just be a date speed record, at least as far as my evenings go.

Besides a compliment about my dress and the opening sarcasm of "Long time, no see" from staff, Secco delivered the lovely and fruity Rolet Cremant Brut Rose, za'atar spiced almonds with sea salt (and the satisfyingly oily accompanying fingertips) along with house-smoked char salad with cured lemon, chives and creme fraiche smeared on crisped baguette slices.

The three large photo enlargements on Secco's walls took on new meaning when I learned that they were old black and white photos of the owner's parents engaged in being social, whether drinking, playing piano or cradling a cat in pearls.

And while I love them, my parents were never so cool as to have such pictures taken of them and this, perhaps, is why I'm unlikely to own a bar.

The music meandered from the XX to Pink Martini-ish as the place gradually filled up around us and countless dogs walked their owners down Robinson Street.

Lemon Cuisine provided a low-key dinner in a dining room that favored non-Indians when we arrived yet boasted a majority native advantage by the time we finished an hour and a half later.

My seafood kad hai of shrimp, ginger, tomato paste and spices set to medium heat was offset by garlic naan and a casual catch-up session with a white blend in our glasses.

I was home so early that a favorite person spotted me online and was quick to ask, "Back from your date already?" What, everyone isn't home by 9:01 after a date?

Fortunately, a romantic reward awaited me with an email from a friend sending me scads of fabulous photos from his secret wedding last Thursday.

We aren't posting them on social media yet, but I thought you would enjoy them!

That's putting it mildly. I was the one he'd come to when he'd first met the love of his life at a New Year's Eve party, seeking my advice about how to woo her. I coached him through a very successful Valentine's Day the next month and she was soon hooked.

Now, less than two years later, they've tied the knot and are off to South Africa to celebrate their love with wine and new adventures. This charming man told me he plans to raise a glass of Pinotage to me and my assist in winning her.

Meanwhile, I envy them every second of it.

Just last week, he'd shown me a note she'd written him pre-wedding, telling me, "I am so in love with this woman" and my heart had melted at his happiness. It's impossible to imagine someone saying the same about me, young or old.

Back in October, I'd been at a dinner with this adorable couple along with three middle-aged friends - one new, two long-time and all divorced. The lovebirds had been excitedly sharing their wedding and honeymoon plans while we more seasoned types basked in their glow.

A few days later, my new friend marveled at the irony of such optimism about their relationship with its wide-open future, especially when surrounded by people who'd already repeatedly failed at love.

Although he was unsure whether to be encouraged by it, I insisted that their passion for what could be should be contagious, regardless of age.

Remember what the Wizard of Oz said? Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.

Even in this new world order, hearts still break which tells this optimist that all things remain possible. I just don't expect to see it coming.

I Think We Have a Topic for Conversation

For a Sunday spent entirely in my own company, it was a surprisingly satisfying day.

Not just because I knocked out the last minute deadline I was given to compensate for someone else's writing sloth, despite it taking up my entire afternoon and missing out on an invitation to see a play with a friend.

We intend to walk and take in an exhibit later this week instead.

Not just because I wrote a chatty and inquisitive four-page letter to answer one I got Friday, part of a correspondence recently begun to enjoy thoughts and questions in handwritten form.

Surely no one could be surprised that a Luddite like me could have a letter fetish.

Not just because I saw possibly the most simultaneously gorgeous and moving film I've experienced in years - "Moonlight" - which should be required viewing for every adult in our country now that we live in this terrifying post-apocalyptic Trump world, but a film that was also an open-ended storytelling wonder, unwilling to be tied up easily or neatly. Like life.

I did have the tiniest regret at having no one to discuss it with afterward, but I'll find someone who's seen it.

Not just because I can always count on the Washington Post to appeal to my wide-ranging interests once I get past the depressing front page news, as it did today with a travel piece about walking the Cotswolds, a book review explaining why playwright Eugene O'Neill was a terrible husband and a first-person piece about why being open, indelicate and downright impolite about your vices helps combat social pressure to relapse.

The struggle is real.

Not just because of enjoying at top volume my latest album acquisition - the National's "Alligator," an especially groovy chartreuse disc - scooped up at Steady Sounds yesterday, moments after the last Smurf passed as the Christmas parade ended and they bravely opened their doors to the masses.

When I first saw them in 2006 opening for Arcade Fire at Constitution Hall, they played a lot off that album and it's remained a sentimental favorite, one I now own on vinyl.

No, I think even an extrovert could be satisfied with a solitary day after a week soaking in the pretty wonderful things the people in my life have been telling me lately.

Like the email saying, "I have a bazillion questions about you I'd like to ask," or another complimenting me saying, "You are my best go-get-some-culture date!"

And probably the best of the best, "I need my Karen fix," like I was heroin or something.

With apologies to Roxy Music, life is the drug I'm thinking of.

Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Thanks to the Bijou, I finally saw D.A. Pennebaker's classic 1967 documentary "Don't Look Back."

You know the one, about Dylan's '65 tour of Britain that begins with the inspiration for INXS' finest video moment as Dylan drops cards with the words from "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

But more significantly, I got to watch a film that also caused a music critic to predict the future.

It will be a good joke on us all if, in fifty years or so, Dylan is regarded as a significant figure in English poetry. ~ Donal J. Henahan, New York Times, September 7, 1967

Maybe it's best the prescient Mr. Henahan was dead by the time Dylan's Nobel Prize nomination was announced.

Although I'm no one's idea of a rabid Dylan fan, I've always been aware of the poetry of his songwriting and over the years I've come to appreciate him in an entirely new light. Still, I needed this 90-minute crash course in that pivotal pre-electric moment in the icon's career.

Watching it, what struck me most was his unexpected charisma, the brashness of his youthful confidence and his sheer nerve in challenging the very square British press corps' shallow grasp of his music and mission.

I don't know how he kept a straight face looking at their bad teeth and walrus-like mustaches, or perhaps they're the reason he asked them questions like, "Are you sure you're really friends with [your friends] if you can't satisfy them?"

Fair question, then or now. For that matter, I'd pose it to my own friends.

But also: So. Much. Smoking.

It's a wonder Dylan's still alive given the 80 or so cigs (the press' estimate of his habit then) he smoked daily and that was on camera. Who know how often he lit up behind closed doors.

Like me, Dylan is a Gemini, so I recognized his tendency to constantly observe and make mental notes about people and surroundings. Some minds just don't turn off.

Is it wrong that after hearing him say, "Either be groovy or leave," I want to have that made into a sign for my apartment? After all, it's really not too much to ask of people, is it?

The many clips of him performing onstage and in hotel rooms were invaluable to a casual fan like me because I saw not only how completely androgynous he looked as a young man, but heard his youthful singing voice and realized it was far more melodic and less full-on nasal-y at this early point (he was 23) than it became.

The Bijou crowd may have been small for the late afternoon show, but our appreciation for the big screen Dylan experience was anything but.

Following the satisfaction of upping our Dylan quotient considerably, there were dogs to be let out and fed, shawarmas to be eaten and a show to get to.

We walked into Hardywood - where they were celebrating today's release of Christmas Morning, a gingerbread stout with coffee - just as Baltimore's Great American Canyon Band took the stage to seduce us with their ethereal folk pop and lovely harmonies.

You could tell that the two singers in front of the drummer were an item just by looking at them.

A musician friend looked at the long, tall drink of water playing guitar and observed, "He looks like Evan Dando." I laughed because had he said that to the younger set in the room, they'd have been clueless, while he bemoaned recently mentioning Michael Stipe to millennial blank stares.

Might I say once again that I weep for the future?

I'd have been happy devoting all my attention to the Great American Canyon Band, but in short order, I ran into a half dozen people I knew and paused from soaking up their gorgeous music to catching up with friends on matters of careers, families and pie-baking skills.

Seems some people are unwilling to pay for a wooden pie carrying box, even if it is American made and sold at a trendy shop.

As the next band, Mikrowaves, was setting up, a friend shared that he'd heard their new album and that if it were coming out this year (it's not), it would be his favorite album of the year, a fact which didn't surprise me since I've been an unabashed fan since the first time I heard their soulful sound.

Besides, who doesn't like a band with not only a drummer and a percussionist, but a female back-up singer and horn section? Or a song that singer Eddie described the opening riffs as sounding "like a Wendy and Lisa song?"

Not us, I can tell you that much.

We were totally getting into the band, dancing in place and having a superb Saturday night when, like a plague of locusts, a group of plastered middle aged people showed up all at once, leading us to joke that they'd arrived by bus.

One guy in a leather jacket, beer held aloft and sloshing dangerously near my head, proceeded to dance off-beat so close that his arm knocked me a few times. Meanwhile, the high-maintenance female contingent muscled their bejeweled selves to the front to dance frantically to songs like "Bubblegum."

Their moves weren't half as sweet as the song.

Fortunately, they were so far gone that when Eddie mocked them from the stage, they didn't even realize, although it got a good laugh out of us.

For my part, I began sending out subliminal messages to them so they'd clear out and return to whatever suburban hell they call home.

Either be groovy or leave, dig?

And they did leave so we could finish enjoying Mikrowaves' smooth musical stylings without the distraction of flailing drunks bearing down on us. Their killer set ended to major applause.

And, sure enough, when we left there was a black bus idling on the street outside. All I can say is, thank heaven that ain't me, babe.

Pink Aluminum Tree Season Begins

My Christmas 2016 baptism by fire commenced today.

First up: a trip to the Northern Neck after an achingly short six hours' sleep to assist my ultra-organized parents with the first rumblings of the season, a morning endeavor that involved stuffing tiny glass ornaments into tiny stockings and then tying even tinier ornaments onto the stocking's ribbon hanger before putting a gift tag sticker on each.

It was just this side of mind-numbing, set to Christmas music, natch.

Post-lunch was spent on the third floor of their house - easily the most sweeping view of the Rappahannock river - digging through dusty boxes to locate tree essentials (stand, skirt, lights) among the scores of ancient brown cardboard boxes that hold their holiday artifacts.

And I'm not being unkind by calling them artifacts. The Smithsonian would.

I mean, we're talking about things such as the crumbling box that has for six decades held their manger scene, the one Mom bought at the Kresge in D.C. the year they married and the pieces of which still have the prices stamped on the bottom.

So you have some idea of what I was dealing with, Joseph and Mary are each marked 29 cents, but the baby in the manger is untarnished with anything so tawdry as a cost.

With glitter on my face and the ancient dust of Christmases past under my fingernails, I drove home into the setting sun for more holiday madness.

Having taken the advice of Comedy Coalition last week - "Wrap yourself in holiday cheer and get your tickets today before all comedy is outlawed forever" - I stood, ticket in hand, waiting on the sidewalk for Mac to pick me up for RVA Tonight's Christmas Spectacular.

After dinner in the service of my hired mouth, we joined the throngs at the Byrd Theater for an evening of comedy, interviews and music based on the saddest of holiday propositions: Santa isn't coming this year.

Holding up the Cheer-o-Meter, it was clear that we were dangerously low on holiday spirit after the events of that Tuesday in November that shall not be named.

Trying to bolster morale, co-host Matt told us that the good news was that NASA discovered 1200 new planets this year.

"So after the inauguration, we've got lots of options," host Beau Cribbs cracked from a set depicting his living room, right down to the band in the kitchen and the lurking elf near the Christmas tree.

When the point of the Christmas elf was questioned, Beau observed nonchalantly, "To normalize the idea of a surveillance state." Yikes.

Looking hard for more things we bid farewell to this year (besides the obvious: Prince, Bowie, Cohen), our hosts name-checked "American Idol" ("They saw America was dying, so they just went away"), Beau's liver and the first amendment.

Funny, not funny, right?

Guests kept showing up in Beau's living room, including mayor-elect Levar Stoney in a requisite awful red and white snowflake holiday sweater (and Levar Stoney socks given to him by his "team"), who good-naturedly answered Beau's burning question, "Can you describe what it felt like to kick Joe Morrissey's ass?"

After the theater erupted in laughter, applause and cheering, he explained that during the campaign, it was important for him to find ways to motivate himself. He found his way with, "I'm going to end this man's career."

When asked about former employer and mentor Terry McAuliffe and his role in all that, Levar didn't hesitate to kiss and tell. "He wasn't governor-ready when we got him. It took a lot of work."

Then it was back to his own debt.

"How many months do you have to do Jon Baliles' laundry? Asking for a friend," Beau wanted to know. "No laundry, I just had to take him to a few VCU basketball games." Lots of belly laughs at that since the pics were all over Facebook.

When asked if he'd been given any advice about his first year in office, Levar said he'd been advised not to try to do too much.

"I'm looking for some singles," he explained before realizing how that sounded. "I'm talking baseball here!" Laughter continued. "Don't go for home runs!" Applause. "I didn't mean that like that, either!"

Of course he didn't.

Holiday cheer arrived in many forms, from commercials for the Nog Bullet (for instantaneous egg nog) and an overly-complicated and frustrating board game, to everybody's favorite organist Bob Gulledge leading a singalong on the mighty Wurlitzer (flashback to every Christmas Eve of mine for the past 20 years, but obviously a novelty to many).

Even so, Beau was still not feeling it, so Matt suggested he sing his feelings, causing him to grab his guitar to sing "Blue Christmas," only to have songbird Natalie Prass walk out (looking absolutely fabulous in winter white palazzo pants and matching sweater) and join him onstage.

She was joined by Eric Slick, the drummer for Dr. Dog (and a solo artist as well), the two having met at the National.

He shared that Dr. Dog had just dropped a new album with all proceeds going to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which got enormous applause from the liberal-leaning crowd.

Natalie debuted her new self-penned holiday song, "Everyoneshavingfunbecauseitschristmas" - its profits are going to SPARC - and followed that by saying she'd do one we knew and proceeded to sing X-tina's "This Christmas," which helped get the Cheer-o-Meter to 99%. Finally.

When it ultimately hit the red zone, it was because the entire cast and band did "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," complete with sax solo, snow falling from the balcony and the jolly old elf marching down the aisle and taking the stage with the cast.

"Did we just save Christmas?" Beau asked incredulously and the crowd gave him his answer. Maybe we can still have a merry Christmas despite the Fascist waiting to take over our country!

It's practically a Christmas miracle.

Mac, also known as  Miss Christmas, wasn't content to let our holiday-themed evening end there, so going home involved a drive-by to ogle the insane decorations on a house in Randolph followed by an attempt at the Christmas house in Oregon Hill, except they'd already pulled the plug for the evening so we were left to admire the sheer amount of plastic figures, but, alas, no lights.

Legend has it that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It's run by a big eastern syndicate, you know, and we've got 23 days before the first of the twelve days of Christmas even begins.

Ho-ho-ho, here's hoping they never outlaw comedy or music to get us through it.

This is the Last Time

It was a "Slow Show" kind of an evening that unfolded gradually.

"Racing Like a Pro" because of a last minute phone call from a friend seeking advice and an eleventh hour email from another seeking activity suggestions for him and a 21-year old, I barely made it on time.

Beginning on a "Brainy" note, a "Friend of Mine" met me at Chop Suey Books for Beth Macy's full house reading of "Truevine," about two albino black children stolen - not "Runaway" - from their mother and showcased in Ringling Brothers circus for 14 years until their mother's "Sorrow" led her to rescue them.

It's a wonder the poor things weren't "Afraid of Everyone."

From there, we moved on to a "Secret Meeting" in plain sight at Secco, where the volume was loud, we considered "Terrible Love," and ate well while drinking "All the Wine."

Or at least all the wine two people need while deep in conversation in "City Middle."

It was soon clear that "Baby, We'll Be Fine" eating spaghetti squash pancakes with harissa yogurt, sweet/salty Brussels sprouts with capers and candied pecans, PEI mussels with spicy sausage and a cheese plate of Midnight Moon, Ossau Iraty and prosciutto, matching glass for glass my Camprosso Gavi with "Mr. November's" Lopez de Heredia Temperanillo, although not to the point that we saw "Pink Rabbits."

The hostess was kind enough to compliment my colorful skirt and our server and I discussed the "Graceless" post-election behavior of certain voters. Meanwhile, it wasn't "Hard to Find" reasons to linger discussing the "Gospel" of middle age, personal "Demons" and lessons learned.

Sharing a recent "Apartment Story " from my own life, we could hardly have been "Mistaken for Strangers," although in certain calendars, I show up by initials rather than as "Karen."

While not exactly "Lit Up," we didn't hesitate to pair chocolate mousse with glasses of Cesar Florido Moscatel, pictures of "Heavenfaced" mountains and enough "Conversation 16" to outlast most of the crowd.

Walking out, we saw that karaoke at Metro Grille was just getting cranked up. A smoker on the sidewalk exhorted us to come have a drink, pick a song and belt it out for strangers. I don't need that kind of "Humiliation," friend.

Far better to acknowledge revised standing with full(er) stories, despite living in a "Lemonworld." As to "Patterns of Fairytales," I think you can say that having "Little Faith" has its rewards.

Most importantly of all, no records were harmed ('though several were listened to) in the making of this blog post.

Get Your Fresh-Sliced Serenity and Calm

I was lured to Washington on false pretenses.

A couple of weeks ago, an artist friend suggested a road trip to the National Gallery to see the Caravaggio show, so I responded by choosing a 72-degree day to do it. Simple.

In the meantime, I read about the opening of a Stuart Davis show, meaning we now had two killer shows to see.

And because I'm the person in this relationship to whom research - not just about the art offerings, but also which restaurants and bars to investigate - and itinerary-making falls, I did my job, albeit at the last minute last night.

Because I waited until the eleventh hour, when I finally did go digging, it was only to discover that Caravaggio was indeed at the National Gallery.

In London. Caravaggio was at the National Gallery in frickin' London.

But, not wanting to be a spoil sport, I didn't immediately share this tidbit when my friend showed up at the crack of dawn (9:15 a.m.) to fetch me.

Sure, I had the Stuart Davis exhibition to offer up as a replacement - not to mention that even without a banner show, we could have easily occupied ourselves at the NGA from opening to close - but there seemed to be no reason to rush the bad news.

But when we stopped at a gas station in Aquia, it seemed like the right moment and I gently broke the news that there'd be no Caravaggio for us.

"Wait! I've got two credit cards in my wallet! We could be there in, what, six or so hours?" Apparently some people deal with disappointment by joking.

The good news is that the unfortunate turn of events worked out just fine. First we saw "Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959-1971," a fascinating show about Virginia Dwan's avant garde galleries, first in LA in the early '60s and then later in NYC.

All the pieces in the show were from Dwan's personal collection and reflected her interest in new art movements, ideas and techniques.

For proof, how '60s revolutionary sounding is this?

Shusaku Arakawa's 1969 "Stolen" got its name because the artist had painted the message, "If possible, steal any one of these drawings including this sentence," with the letters of "sentence" getting progressively lighter as if they'd been stolen already.

Naturally a group of students sent the artist a letter of intent to steal the piece, then stole it and sent a telegram confirming what they'd done. Arakawa responded, saying what a great surprise it was to be "collaborating" with them and suggesting they donate the work to a museum.

This being the '60s, most museums scoffed at the notion of accepting a gift of a stolen artwork until finally a Connecticut museum accepted it and renamed it "Stolen."

Hell, that's a practically perfect short story circa 1969.

For sheer impact, it was tough to beat Robert Smithson's "Glass Stratum," 37 stepped glass pieces, each 2" smaller than the last, for a pyramid effect of brilliant translucence and opaqueness simultaneously.

I bet it must have seemed incredibly modern in 1967.

After making a detour through a collection of small French works - Bonnard, Vuillard, Modigliani, Matisse - in the East Building to cleanse our artistic palates, we headed directly to the replacement main event: "Stuart Davis: In Full Swing."

We could practically hear the jazz music just looking at the scads of canvases on the walls.

Despite being able to recognize his distinctive later canvases, neither of us had any more than a cursory knowledge of Davis so we arrived eager to soak in this retrospective, only to be rewarded again and again by an artist whose career didn't begin to take off until he'd passed the mid-century mark.

Kind of reassuring, isn't it?

I'm sure it's completely coincidental, but the exhibit was made possible by Altria and began with Davis' early paintings of tobacco packages in muted colors. Zig Zag rolling papers put in frequent appearances in his works from the '20s, as did Lucky Strikes.

It was, after all, the era of smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Making our way through the next couple decades' worth of still lifes, urban scenes and landscapes, we watched as he began adding in commercial elements and advertising language, moving closer to the Stuart Davis we knew.

But where he truly nailed it to the wall was when he began giving reality a make-over, providing the ultimate American take on self re-invention.

He did that by recycling his old compositions, reworking them into something wholly different, something immediately recognizable as the decidedly abstract, prominently pop culture-referenced and defiantly American Stuart Davis paintings that could be mistaken for the art of no one else.

With 100 paintings in the show, it's impossible to pick favorites, but I don't know who could resist the sleight of hand as Davis took the perfectly pleasant "House and Street" with its simple buildings, signs and ladders and re-imagined it as the oh-so hip "The Mellow Pad," a painting that took six years to finish and is filled to bursting with musical energy, rhythmic patterns and brilliant colors.

Despite the name suggesting someone very much in tune with NYC's jazz scene (he's referred to as "the artist laureate of the Jazz Age"), the last thing it evokes is a mellow place.

When I think mellow, I think of my friend's recent description of my apartment - "Your slice of serenity and calm" - not the swingin' hot spot abstractly depicted in Davis' canvas.

We felt completely at home looking at his "Champion," a work on loan from the VMFA and so familiar to me that I could tell you where it usually hangs in the 20th century gallery.

Oh, that old thing? We're practically on a first name basis (although I hand't been aware of the Kirk Douglas movie tie-in).

But what we hadn't seen was the heartbreaking final work of Davis' career, worked on as recently as the night before he died of a stroke.

Masking tape still marks off straight lines and the work is clearly unfinished, yet the artist painted "Fin" at the top and then was gone the next day. Perhaps he sensed something.

All I know is that the two of us left there in a Stuart Davis-induced euphoria, unwilling to take on another exhibit despite being in a city full of world class art, because our minds and hearts were still busy happily processing what we'd just experienced.

We were jazzed and the original reason for our excursion was by then no more than a distant memory.

But, oh, Caravaggio, we'd have happily met you in London if only we'd had our passports with us...

Be Beautiful But Shut Up

I feel certain that I alone reveled in the table fan.

That the Italian film began with a close-up of a table fan, that said fan seemed to blow our (unexpectedly) blond heroine's hair no matter where she stood in the room while breaking up with her lover, that the fan set the scene for a warm weather plot revolving around love, undoubtedly made me happier than anyone else at the Grace Street Theatre tonight.

I'd gone to VCU Cinematheque to see my second Michelangelo Antonioni film, "L'Eclisse," but if I were honest, I went because I'd read Alain Delon was in it (and the lump sum of my knowledge of him was from reading and let's face it, you really need to see a man in the flesh to fully appreciate him) and because it was a 1962 film, easily one of my favorite periods in movie history (especially in Italy...or France or swingin' London) for its depiction of a cultural tipping point.

Let's just say that the first music played was a variation called "L'Eclisse Twist." Groovy.

But a table fan, I mean, come on, I still have one that does double duty: as auxiliary breeze during warm weather and as white noise every night.

I realize most 21st century people see them as relics of a bygone age, but not me.

And if you think my fan devotion is absurd, know that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My father still has his mother's table fan, an extremely heavy relic from the '50s, which miraculously still works.

The beautifully shot black and white movie was full of post-war ennui as well as a Rome completely unrecognizable from the one I saw four years ago because "L'Eclisse" was shot during a period of massive urban renewal and aerial shots particularly showed huge swaths of the city as no more than empty lots and barren wastelands.

I wish I didn't love you or that I loved you much more.

Alain was rakishly handsome as anticipated, but he was also shallow, materialistic and incapable of love, as much a problem for our heroine as for any smart woman.

Two people shouldn't know each other too well if they want to fall in love.

Although the audience had several familiar adult faces - the Frenchman, the book reader, the record collector, the theater critic - the crowd was mostly students and while film students may have appreciated the 54-year old movie, many of the others apparently did not grasp our heroine's distrust of the frenzy of the modern world.

I feel like I'm in a foreign country.
Funny, that's how I feel around you.

But if they occasionally drifted out when the story got slow, they left in droves during the last 7 or 8 minutes when neither character showed up for their supposed rendezvous, leaving the audience to watch the business of life - buses, pedestrians, water - at the intended place of the assignation.

Too bad for them. Life doesn't always happen in a quick cut, rapid-fire manner but the beauty of Anonioni's film is that he demonstrates with exquisite beauty how hopeless the pursuit of love can be.

It's then that you shut yourself away from the modern world, turn on your table fan and drift off to dreams of somehow getting it right.

As an old friend said at dinner tonight, if not now, when?

The Naked and the Bloody

How could I not say farewell to Troma films at Gallery 5?

As I've learned over the course of this three-month film series, there are givens: tongue-in-cheek horror, graphic violence, buckets of blood and erotica, catnip for a crowd that laps up that kind of stuff.

What I hadn't anticipated was the pre-film erotica I walked in to, namely footage of naked dancing girls from the early '70s judging by the abundant pubic hair, non-augmented breasts, long straight hair and the psychedelic pinwheels, fireworks and haze effects that filtered over and under them, with occasional cutaways to a macho man-type with a serious porn 'stache apparently dreaming of the dancers.

I figured it was just a little something to occupy us until the main event, "Father's Day" began searing our eyeballs with the antics of a serial male rapist and killer (hence the "Happy Father's Day!" as he finishes people off) and the three brave men loose cannons (a priest and two victim's sons) who set out to stop the madness.

When the priest is told that Ahab, the man he needs to find to help catch the bad guy is far away, we see him crossing beaches, bodies of water, jungles and Antarctica before winding up, clothing in tatters, at a plain old cabin in the woods.

We're talking about a movie with a "Creature Effects" screen credit, with many of the so-called "creatures" being badly brutalized victims of the crazed killer, Chris Fuchman (get it?). So, yes, campy, gory and about as socially pungent as they come.

Unlike most of the audience, there's much about a Troma film I have to close my eyes for. Like disembowelment.

Granted, we're not talking the kind of filmmakers who are going for realistic decapitations or shootings, but even so, I can live out my life without seeing a bad guy slice a child's eyeball and leave him for dead, but that's just me.

Fortunately, no Troma film would be complete without large doses of humor and "Father's Day" accommodated with insider winks (a sign outside a large building that read, "Tromaville Courthouse," the local bar, the Lowlife) and sight gags (more fat, white naked man butts than anyone needs to see) and enthusiastic incest.

There was a whole lot of laughter in the room besides my own, probably as much at the gross bits as for the intentionally hilarious parts.

We even got to see Troma founder and big cheese Lloyd Kaufman in the white-suited role as both god and the devil, but coming across more like a modern day Mel Brooks than anything else. And that's funny.

"Lock up your fathers!" the movie warns us. Since August, when I wanted absurd and unsettling, Troma delivered  the goods.

Wow, Gallery 5, those three months of neo-grindhouse just flew by. Isn't that always the way with self-mutilation and pole dancing?

Remember Me as a Sunny Day

Depending on your threshold for pain, there are multiple ways to relive the past.

In the less than two weeks since I got my turntable, I have lost hours, nay, entire day parts (and half the nights) listening to records, mostly with others, but alone as well.

It's already obvious I won't have any problem getting people to listen to records with me, but even better, some of my guests bring me gifts - the first three Pretender albums, new Yo la Tengo and the National - to ensure they'll be asked back. Smart men, all.

The sheer delight of listening to my decades-old record collection (so many albums lost to exes) keeps landing me in the Way Back Machine as I repeatedly get lost in what the song/album meant to me or reminds me of, how I came to it and why I loved it enough to buy it.

So after reading an article about Diana Ross in yesterday's Washington Post (ahead of her upcoming shows in D.C.), I thought it a fitting listen when I came across her 1976 Greatest Hits album.

The songs were mostly familiar, but where I became completely enraptured was when "Remember Me" came on.

The first notes of the piano grabbed me by the adolescent heart as I recalled how that Ashford & Simpson song - about a girl dumped by her guy, wishing him the best and imploring him to remember her as a good thing - had ruled my young world for a bit, despite the plain fact that I hadn't had so much as the stirrings of a relationship yet.

Remember me as the sound of laughter
And my face the morning after...
Remember me as a breath of Spring
Remember me as a good thing

Was I already looking past getting a boyfriend to getting dumped and moving on? Who knows how the teen age mind works?

And while I like how present you have to be when you're playing vinyl - even when it takes you directly to the past - some people I know prefer to look back at their lives by being mocked by all their friends rather than listening to old records, so when I got an invitation to Parker's 40th birthday roast at Gallery 5 last night, I signed on.

The only requested donation was for scarves, hats and canned goods for the Dakota pipeline protesters and I was more than happy to winnow my scarf and glove basket for the sake of a worthy cause. That it was also a benefit for Planned Parenthood, with all monetary proceeds being donated in Mike Pence's name made it even sweeter.

Lobo Marino played first and it was harmonium player and singer Laney who asked of the crowd, "Can I real quick get a show of hands of who's seen Parker's testicles?" Fully two thirds of the room raised their hands, although mine was not among them.

Because Laney had a cold and because the evening was all about Parker, Lobo Marino planned to play a short set.

It was after they did a moving new post-election song from their upcoming album that they invited former bandmate Nathaniel to join them onstage to play banjo.

During that song, the brown-skinned, mutton-chopped musician and one of the night's official roasters leaned toward me and whispered, "Let us not deny the whiteness of this - one man is playing banjo and another is playing jaw harp while beating his bare foot on a drum."

It was mighty white, I had to agree, but then, so is Parker and the diaper he's been known to wear.

Next up was singer/guitarist Georgie Isaacs, and part of her connection to Parker, like several others, was learning about the coal ash situation from his non-stop Facebook feed. See, it's not only about genitals with Parker.

But probably in a nod to the birthday boy, she did a mash-up that included "I Wanna Be Like You" from "The Jungle Book," as well as a couple of self-penned gems, one about needing a penis between her thighs and the other about procrastination masturbation ("I'll get to it as soon as I get off").

Burlesque queen Deanna Danger did a clown striptease (because, of course, Parker wanted one) that involved putting a gold top hat with shamrock on the birthday boy (clad in a vest and red sequin Speedo) and having him hold a rainbow while she squirted Velveeta into his pot of gold.

The roast itself skewered not only Parker ("Dude, I'll never get over the visual of you kissing my Mom") but the other roasters as well, making for equal opportunity mud-slinging.

You'd have to be a brave soul to sign on to being onstage with this bunch.

If my friends were to roast me, I can just imagine the aspects of Karen they'd mock. Bon would blast how fast I walk and Pru my need for multi-tasking, while Holmes would berate my overly long bangs. Moira would tease me about expecting my friends to keep up with me.

The list could go on if I'd allow it.

Instead, I'll skip the roast and go back to listening to records with friends. Although I began my new millennium record-listening party with a selection of rag tag albums from my checkered past, the irresistible urge to go buy more now that I have myself this groovy hi-fi has taken me to three record stores, one twice.

From "Roxy Music: The Atlantic Years 1973-80" to three Joan Armatrading records to "The Best of Donny Hathaway," I am meandering through the byways of my past via music I haven't heard in years, if not decades. That it all sounds so fabulous on vinyl only makes the trip better.

Welcome to 40, Parker. Ain't no mountain high enough to keep you from exposing your genitalia for decades to come. Age, my friend, isn't about how old you are, but how many friends and records you enjoy along the way.

Sex is a Dish Best Served Piping Hot

The only thing missing from the movie tonight was a bowl of hot ramen, but then, one of the Bijou co-founders acknowledged as much.

"If I'd thought about it in time, we'd have had ramen here tonight," James said during his introduction to "Tampopo," a 1985 Japanese ode to food that began with the requisite strangers of a classic Western riding into town reading from a master's book on how to eat ramen.

First, observe the ramen...caress the surface with the chopstick tips...then poke the pork.

If that didn't make it clear enough that we were about to see a film abut the romance of food (not to mention the sex of it) in the context of a "noodle Western," I don't know what would have. If I'd had a lick of sense, I'd have gone out for ramen before the movie rather than watching two hours celebrating the glory of the steaming bowl while salivating the entire time.

Thanks to the Bijou, we were watching a new 4K restoration of a film I'd never heard of, but one considered the precursor to other classic foodie movies such as "Big Night" and "Eat Drink Man Woman." I was so out of the loop on this one and they were here to bring me up to speed.

What surprised me most about "Tampopo" was how unexpectedly funny it was throughout, never more so than when noodles were slurped to their final whistling sound as they slid between lips.

Our hero was a cowboy hat-wearing truck driver who, along with his sidekick, happens on a ramen shop run by our heroine, a widow with a young son, one rainy night and decides to help her turn the failing venture into a top chef ramen joint.

Along the way, he wears his hat in the bathtub (a scene so steamy and appealing it made me want a bath STAT... Calgon, take me away...), fights some locals to make his point (but as in any good Western, they do it outside so as not to mess up the place) and tastes through every iteration of her ramen until, with the aid of the five men helping her research (so a whole lot of man-splaining goin' on), she finally gets it right, a climax that requires he smoke a cigarette.

Interspersed with the story of building the perfect ramen shop - visiting competitors, comparing recipes, and finessing culinary secrets from another chef - are a series of food-related sub-plots that reinforce the theme.

There's the gangster and his moll, both dressed all in white, sometimes even when they're using food to enhance their sex. Breasts get the whipped cream treatment, honey is poured and, in one startlingly memorable scene, they pass a raw egg yolk back and forth between their mouths until she bites it and it runs out of her mouth. Ahem.

Wait, there's more. A freshly caught oyster is eaten with a drop of blood atop it from a cut caused by the shell. A food-savvy street person sneaks into a restaurant to make a rice and ketchup pancake for the widow's son. A man forces his deathly ill wife to make dinner before dying  and she does, then dies.

Easily the grossest thing we witnessed was a soft shell turtle having his throat slit so the blood could drain and he could be cooked. Honestly, that was something I could have lived without seeing.

When our middle-aged heroine got a makeover with a new 'do and very '80s-looking polka dot dress with massive shoulder pads, our taciturn hero was unimpressed. "Now you look hard to talk to," he said.

A scene involving a woman who'd go into a grocery store for the sole purpose of squeezing things - peaches, cheeses, buns - was striking because of the lack of color in the merchandise other than fruits and vegetables.

When I commented on that to my seatmate, the scooter queen, she snickered and said, "Their stores were still made of real ingredients." I fear our stores had already passed that threshold by 1985.

I couldn't have been the only one feeling my head spin watching such an absurdist Japanese take on a Spaghetti Western, but also a seriously sensuous movie. Excellent choice, Bijou.

Watching yet another round of ramen being sampled noisily on screen, my friend leans in and whispers, "This is a movie about slurping, isn't it?" Hmm, well, yes, as long as slurping is a metaphor for savoring food and sex.

Because we all know you can only slurp for so long before you've got to poke the pork. Fact.

Say Good Morning to the Night

I went to see my first exhibit of Cuban photographs last night and then Fidel Castro died.

Coincidence?

The show by Joe Ring at Artworks, "Cuban Chrome," focused on the colorful old cars from the pre-Revolution era (and now used as cabs), set against backdrops of the island's magnificent architecture, stormy skies and crashing surf.

For me, the appeal of the photographs was color, namely the serendipitous way a yellow car parked in front of a yellow building, or the scattered touches of aqua in an alley scene that popped between buildings, people and cars.

But for the guy with me, an appealing palette was insufficient and he was curious yellow. As he leaned in close for examination, he wanted to know how much post-production work had been done to the photographs to achieve what we were ogling.

Fortunately, the photographer overheard him and was gracious enough to point out specific areas he'd enhanced as well as those that were untouched, despite their hyper-colorful nature and brilliant reflection of light. His strongest point was how similar what he does digitally to photos now is to what he used to do to them in the darkroom during the finessing process.

The good news was my companion was more than satisfied once his curiosity had been satisfied by the artist. As we left, he was already declaring that the mustard-colored T-bird close-up was his hands-down favorite, which only proves that you can lead a man to art and, with any luck, he'll not only drink it in but thank you for steering him there.

I had more new experiences in store for him because he'd never been to Laura Lee's just down the road, and although I had, there was a new (yet very familiar) chef in place since my last visit, making it feel somewhat new for me as well.

Installed at the corner of the bar, I knew I'd chosen the right place when the first song we heard was "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" from 1972's "Honky Chateau" and a bottle of Mont Grave Rose soon followed.

Before long, a favorite chef and his date came in for dinner and the bartender got busy right away concocting a drink named for the chef's habit of singing loudly in the kitchen, and always replacing the word "girl" in songs with "squirrel."

Hence the cocktail that was forming in front of us: the Uptown Squirrel.

I'm gonna try for an uptown squirrel
She's been living in her white bread world...

On the other side of me at the bar was one of my favorite actors from the Comedy Coalition, notable because she inadvertently changed the trajectory of our meal when her heaping plate of fried shrimp arrived. The lightly-battered shrimp, a special, smelled divine and looked even better, so we pulled a Meg Ryan.

We'll have what she's having.

For my companion, it was a stroll down Memory Lane, reminding him of the fabulous fried shrimp he used to get at a seafood place in Lynnhaven called Steinhilber's and never seen successfully replicated anywhere else.

I'd managed to stir up fond memories for him without even intending to do so.

For good measure, we also got an equally large mound of fried oysters and a charcuterie plate, notable for the unlikely inclusion of southern staple hushpuppies (score!) alongside three kinds of meats including speck, prosciutto and a fabulous orange fennel ham, with a schmear of grainy mustard and everything from pickled okra and carrots to thickly-sliced housemade bread and butter pickles on the side.

By then, the music had changed to the Zombies (with several Colin Blunstone solo cuts thrown in for good measure) and, like the Elton John, we were hearing multiple songs. Turns out it's Laura Lee's standard operating procedure to play whole albums and not just songs, a practice preferable for those of us weaned on entire records and not singles.

Score again.

There was no way I was passing up salted German chocolate cake while he was seduced by the Key lime tart with vanilla bean gelato, and you could've stuck a fork in us because we were so done by then, at least with eating.

Yet the night was still young.

Eager to show off some of the record finds I'd lifted from my Dad's collection, we made a bee line for the turntable to investigate the comedic talents of Brother Dave Gardner, a "beat" comedian in the vein of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, except a Southern boy, one-time seminary student, but also a jazz drummer and occasional lounge singer.

Let's just say that on every album cover, he's got a cigarette in his hand, Rat Pack-style and there was a fair amount of cigarette humor. His southern accent was so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Apparently he'd been big on college campuses in the late '50s and early '60s and Dad had given me four of his albums for consideration. Our goal was trying to listen to them in the context of the time for maximum effect.

Brother Dave delivered in spades on the 1961 album, "Ain't That Weird," saying, "We don't care if Kennedy's spending all our money because Johnson'll get it all back!"

The nightclub crowd howled.

He did a dated bit on politics - "I was from the South, so I was a Democrat. Then I learned how to read..." - and mocked JFK's pronunciation of Cuba as "Cu-ber" before referring to "this cat, Kruschev" as casually as if they were drinking buds.

But beneath his hep cat lingo was a sharp-eyed, quick-witted Southern boy who made observations like, "The Beats are seeking poverty to learn from it," a pretty profound statement if you think about it. And we did.

Because you can lead a man to your records, but you have to reach a certain point in the evening before thinking turns into deep discussion.

Meanwhile, I'm seeking to learn from it all.

A Lot of Sumthin', Sumthin"

A tradition since 2010 and Neil Young said "Tonight's the night" ~ Holmes

I broke Thanksgiving eve tradition and Holmes was not going to let it slide. Instead of our usual pre-turkey revelry, I'd been invited to dinner and a big show, necessitating we reschedule our annual standing Wednesday date to post-holiday.

Let's just say he wouldn't commit to a replacement date, but I'm still working on him.

Instead, my fellow music lover and I hoofed it over to Julep, which turned out to be a destination for others show-bound, not just the one we were attending - the king and queen of hearts world tour featuring Mary J.Blige and Maxwell at the Coliseum - but also Joe Bonamassa at the Landmark.

Not a lot of overlap of those two audiences on a Venn diagram, if you think about it.

But everybody's gotta eat, so we wasted no time in getting to the business of ordering because our show began at the ungodly hour of 7:00 and I'd been instructed to skip lunch (easier because I hadn't gotten up until 11:45 after a late night).

A bottle of Sokol Blosser Rose got the evening started right, followed by Hongatonk oysters from Maryland, which came pre-dressed with blood orange mignonette, while the soup special - and it's most definitely suddenly soup season - of duck confit and black bean in a clear broth was a stellar marriage of rich and earthy.

For the main event, perfectly pan-seared scallops were gussied up (and made obscene) with Woodson Mill polenta, oyster mushrooms, drawn paprika butter and hunks of buttermilk bleu cheese, while the larger appetite went with rockfish, although I believe he may have been swayed by the bacon, rice and collards underneath.

We had just enough time for me to get my chocolate fix with a three-layer flourless torte to accompany the last of the Rose before joining the throngs at the Coliseum, a process that involves not only having your bag checked, but a full body wanding to check for the kinds of things nobody should bring to a show.

Granted, I don't think I've been to the Coliseum in a dozen or so years, but this amped-up security was new to me. In fact, it had been so long that I was seeing the Coliseum with fresh eyes and, except for the truly awful concession stands and over-priced beer vendors, it wasn't nearly as big or unpleasant as I recalled.

Or maybe that's just because we arrived moments before Mary J. Blige appeared behind a curtain and began singing long before we could see her. Explosions and a light show announced the moment we finally laid eyes on the queen of hearts.

I'm not going to act like I was a long-time fan, but the woman has been making music for nearly a quarter of a century, so she's pretty much woven into the musical fabric of our lifetime whether you were paying attention or not.

Unlike many people in the crowd, I couldn't sing along to all of her older songs word for word, but that didn't stop me from picking up on MJ's bold-faced message of all pain, all the time, augmented by multiple costume changes that showed MJ is still in fine shape, even if she's yet to meet a man worthy of her.

At one point, she began a pointed lecture directed at the men in the room about treating their woman like a queen and staying faithful, then switched over to the womenfolk for some consciousness raising, reminding us not to take crap from our men.

Pshaw. Clearly that message was intended for some of the younger women in attendance because those of us of an age long ago learned that lesson. I would go so far as to say that it's a woman's perogative to determine the boundaries of a friendship or a relationship, a fact not unnoticed (and often commented on) by the males in my own sphere.

The show was a major production, a well-oiled machine, no doubt intended to justify the expense of the tickets, with elaborately-curated video screens behind the stage as if the performer alone wasn't enough to keep the crowd entertained.

But for me, the real excitement began when Prince's "Kiss" ended on the speakers and the lithe and handsome Maxwell came out in sunglasses and a three piece suit (to me, looking for all the world like a 21st century Harry Belafonte and that's some high praise), singing the opening song, "All the Ways Love Can Feel" from his latest album and showing off his falsetto without delay.

Effortlessly and gracefully sliding down the ramps from the upper stage level to the catwalk level allowed him to be up close with his adoring fans, of which I'm a late-comer. Trying to catch up, I've had his latest album "blackSUMMERS'night" on constant rotation in my car for a while now.

But even for long-time fans, it would be tough to beat Maxwell's take on Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work," in which he did a duet with Bush's vocal in front of a screen honoring the important musical figures we lost this past year and concluding with a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The song alone is magnificent, Maxwell's cover of it has always been a stunner and the live performance of it - he was on his knees at one point - well, it was enough to make the entire show a must-see.

He got lots of applause when he got political about the challenging times we're living in post-election, saying that we just need to get through the next four years until Michelle Obama can be elected President. Amen.

Hearing "Lake by the Ocean" live was pure pleasure, although I can't say I recognized all the older songs this suave man did, but I'm honest enough to admit that just hearing his soulful croon and remarkable falsetto is enough for me, familiar or not.

Add in thrusting hips, frequent agility moves like splits and drops to the knee, not to mention how he cuts the air with his hand to punctuate what his kick ass band is doing, and I, for one, am not going to look away.

But where he truly won my heart was when he spotted an over-zealous security guard and set out to right a wrong.

"Let them dance!" Maxwell called from the stage. "Let them dance! Let them dance, please!" Finally, the guard who'd been trying to stop people from moving in the most natural way to soul music looked up, realizing he'd all but stopped the show.

"I know you're just doing your job," Maxwell said in his direction. "But these people came here to enjoy the music and dance. Let them!"

Needless to say, the guard did. Other than Mary J. Blige - who likely doesn't obey anyone - who wouldn't listen when Maxwell tells you what to do? I know I would. We're talking about the King of Hearts here.

Not that I think Holmes will take that for an excuse if he's quoting me Neil Young. My, my, hey, hey, we'll see.

Trouble Finds Me

It's seasonal change time for new people in my life.

Ye gads, I don't mean I switch out friends when Fall inches toward Winter, I mean that people - those new in my life who've yet to know me through cold weather - haven't yet learned to be prepared.

Translation: always dress appropriately for possible hoofing. My date had proper layers on, but decided against bringing his scarf, a move he later regretted on leg three of our evening.

They live and learn or fall by the wayside. I believe that's called survival of the fittest.

After dealing with especially dense traffic traversing the city from Carytown to chez moi (I could empathize after a recent 23-minute trip from Chop Suey home at rush hour), he was more than happy to put foot to pavement en route to the Grace Street Theater for VCU Cinematheque.

Along the way, he was providing an impromptu history lesson about the area, from clubs I'd never heard of to Grace Place, which I had, as well as a hilarious explanation of why he hadn't frequented the Lee Art Theatre for its porn programming.

It's always a lighter than usual crowd at VCU's screening before Thanksgiving and tonight was no different for the 76-minute "River of Grass," director Kelly Reichardt's first film and recently restored to its glorious 1994 brilliance.

Who knew films needed shoring up after only two decades?

The reigning visiting Prof introduced the movie by reading what would have been a fairly compelling paper on Reichardt and the development of her films, but came across as flat yet inquisitive when read aloud because each sentence ended with his voice going up so it sounded like a question.

It's a film that deals with later wave feminist issues?
It's far from a perfect film?
This is a getaway film in the style of Bonnie and Clyde?

Well, it is or it isn't? For god's sake, man, mean what you say and stop sounding so damn tentative.

Two unhappy people - the kind of young mother who puts Coke in her baby's bottle and a n'er-do-well who's finally kicked out of Grandma's house at age 30 - meet in Florida, think they killed someone and take off in his car.

Looking very much like an old school movie, it also delivered a smack upside the head about the role of Fate in our lives, but always with a wink and a sly nod.

There was narration that didn't always match the action ("He told me to stay home while he was on his crime spree," as he goes through his grandmother's underwear drawer). Languid pacing that appealed to seasoned audience members but only a millennial film student could stand. Jazz music and a character who practices that kind of drumming throughout the story.

It's love on the run seen through a post-Coen brothers lens, not to mention wearing its '90s indie heart on its sleeve. Dreadful things happen that seem very funny in the moment. Lotsa deadpan reactions.

Not to be missed is the marvel of watching our lovers smoke a joint by passing it to each other using only their toes. I would doubt this scenario more if I hadn't once been able to open a man's wallet and remove a credit card from it using only my toes.

But enough of that...

After a thoroughly satisfying 76 minutes of sun-drenched Florida seediness, characters born to hopelessness and an ending emphasizing the inevitability of Life, some bracing cold air was just what we needed.

That we had to walk a half a mile to eat may have resulted in a tad more bracing than He Who Shuns Scarves required, but so be it. Inside 821 Cafe, there was a heater practically with my name on it positioned right next to the booth in the front window, so the decision was made.

Our server was new to me, so she was unaware of my standing order, but when the bearded guy delivered my black bean nachos, he nodded, saying, "Oh, of course" when he recognized me. The 821 virgin called his choice of a grilled cheese with turkey and a side of chili a "sick day lunch," but he didn't wolf it down like he was ailing, if you know what I mean.

Besides, sick days always involved ginger ale at my house.

Walking back, I teased him that he'd shown up at my door with a record so I'd invite him up to show off my new (old) turntable again, but he insisted his motives were purer than that. Did I mention his decided sense of humor?

Still, he didn't hesitate to accept my invitation upstairs for a listening party that included his gift: a double album, the National's 2013 "Trouble Will Find Me," and my first vinyl of theirs. Even four sides in, Matt Berninger's voice never sounded so warm.

Just the thing on a cold night involving traipsing all over with a fair weather friend who seems motivated to get the hang of Winter with a walker.

And who, like me, is already counting the days to Winter Solstice. In the meantime, there will be scarves.

Up the Nose, Into the Lungs

Kepone: local band, song by the Dead Kennedys and, today, topic of a lunchtime talk at Library of Virginia.

When speaker Dr. Gregory Wilson inquired of the nearly full room who didn't know about the local Kepone crisis in 1975, only one woman raised her hand.

"Then this is for you," he joked of his lecture, "Toxic Dust: The Virginia Kepone Disaster." It's impossible now to fathom how it was ever considered okay to dump such a thing in our creeks, rivers, or even bury in on land, but there you go, it was a different time.

And while I knew of the insecticide, I didn't get to Richmond until '88, the year the ban on fishing the James River was finally lifted, so I definitely needed a remedial course on what went down in Hopewell that kept people out of the river I'm now devoted to

And this being 2016, the audience could collectively watch a YouTube video originally made by OSHA, with interviews with workers from Hopewell's Allied and Life Sciences Product Company who'd inhaled the dust - or even eaten it by inadvertently placing their lunch on kepone dust-covered tables - for so long and were then paying the price with their health.

Just as damning was footage of wives testifying at the Senate hearings about how even though they washed their husband's work clothing separately, the poison lingered in the washing machine and then contaminated the rest of the family's clothing, affecting them as well.

The best thing to have come out of all that, besides the obvious, closing the kepone plant, was that $8 million of the $13 million settlement went to the establishment of the Virginia Environmental Endowment to hopefully prevent such a debacle happening again.

Wilson was adamant that the kepone issue had been uncovered at exactly the right moment in time, namely the '70s, not long after the EPA had been created and the first Earth Day had brought together people to address environmental concerns. Had kepone come to the fore in the '50s, he thought it might have been swept under the carpet.

And while his talk was interesting for bringing me up to speed on local environmental history, I was probably even more fascinated to get a little Hopewell history.

Like that it had been developed in 1914 by Dupont Company to house dynamite and gunpowder factories for WW I. He even showed us a postcard image from 1914 boasting, "Hopewell, toughest town north of hell!"

This is a tourism slogan?

And that signs leading in and out of town used to read, "Chemical Capital of the South," as if it were a point of pride, at least until vandals scratched through chemical and wrote "kepone" and through South and wrote "world." Wilson assured us that those signs were subsequently removed.

Damn. You just never know what you don't know until you learn it.

Dixie is Dead and Trump is Terrifying

I've been violated.

At least that's how I felt when I was greeted by alarmist messages from my bank alerting me that someone was using my debit card all over New York City yesterday.

Not what I was expecting upon returning home from a pleasant day on the Northern Neck with my parents.

It was all the more abrupt because spending the day with them is akin to stepping through a magic looking glass to a different world. At least all the clocks in the house now read correctly, something that's not the case during the months of daylight saving time when they refuse to change their clocks (on principle, naturally).

Probably because it was a chilly 42 degrees when I drove through Tappahannock, our activities centered around the cozy: Mom wanted to put heavier comforters on some of the beds and Dad wanted help ordering new L.L. Bean flannel sheets (Mariner's blue, queen size) after spying a tiny hole in a sheet on their bed.

It was while I was on the big sleeping porch - especially inviting because of the morning sunlight streaming through the walls of windows - in search of their favorite white blanket that I spotted a stack of my parents' records from the '50s right on up through the '80s and dropped everything to investigate.

Finally having a turntable, receiver and Bose speakers - all used, mind you - changes what gets my attention these days.

Spotting me from the other end of the corridor that leads to the porch, Dad called out to his heathen daughter, chuckling, "What are you doing on your knees, praying?" As if.

Many of the albums I flipped through brought back immediate musical memories - some good, some painful - of hearing them played in the house where I grew up. My parents were deep into Neil Diamond, so there were at least ten of his records, along with a handful of Moody Blues and more late '50s instrumental music than I remembered.

Where I was most surprised was with his array of disco and R & B vinyl: Quincy Jones' 1972 double disco album "Ndeda," Larry Graham's "One in a Million You" from '80 (complete with TMI, as in, "You can write to Larry at P.O. Box 46035, LA, CA 90046) and a really early George Benson record called "Shape of Things to Come" from 1968.

Then there was the piece de resistance.

My father, a man who was nothing if not au courant as Dads went back then (hair past his collar, magnificent mutton chops), had a copy of Van McCoy's "The Hustle," I kid you not. I have no memory of this fact, but I was impressed enough to take the album, along with a dozen others.

When he sees that I've snatched up "The In Crowd" by the Ramsey Lewis Trio, recorded at D.C.'s Bohemian Caverns, he makes sure I know that, "I was into Ramsey Lewis way before they made it big with that album."

You see how cool he was?

By the time I left them mid-afternoon, the mercury had only risen four degrees, making me glad to get back to my more densely populated neighborhood and the attendant shared heat (not that my parents' house isn't kept at hothouse temperatures that have even a cold-blooded person like me shedding layers), even if I was met with the news of fraud and the ensuing inconveniences resulting from it.

Luckily, Mac and Secretly Y'All awaited me a few short blocks away at Gallery 5.

Tonight's theme was "Headlines," ("No, Joe Morrissey is not in the building," our host quipped) so we heard from a slew of local journalists riffing on the subject.

Harry brought props and shared how an article on the infamous Dirtwoman had inspired him to become a journalist, but only after his high school guidance counselor had advised him that, "There's a cheap journalism school up the street." That would be VCU.

The Library of Virginia's Errol brought us up to speed on Richmond's fighting editor and Jackson Ward resident, John Mitchell, with a tangent about a newsman friend working in Danville who got fired for the headline, "Dixie is Dead, Elvis is Dead and Danville is Dying."  Hilarious.

Katy's story of investigating an unreported woman's death was positively heartbreaking while Chris' story of Mayor Wilder trying to rearrange City Hall after midnight involved sheriffs, a lot of PBR, illegal Vespa Stella parking and, tangentially, the headline that had first inspired him to take up journalism: "Preacher Dies in Flaming Mobile Pulpit."

Where tonight's Secretly Y'All differed from so many of the ones I've attended over the years was that it took place in a post-2016 election world, which, as we're all still trying to grasp, feels like a horrific new world order.

Brad offered up a report on being LGBTQ in Trump's America, a terrifying proposition, to be sure, that included learning about the numbers of LGBTQ people who bought guns, both after Obama's election (talk about misguided) and Trump's so-called election. A pink camo assault weapon and Colonial Shooting Academy both figured prominantly into his story.

But the undisputed highlight of listening to tonight's storytellers was when the RTD's Michael Paul Williams took the stage, intent on making us see that the most important stories are ahead of us.

"We need a lot of anger now," he said passionately. "They're trying to push out information as the new normal and that's not right." Amen, brother.

We listened as he told a tale of two of his stories, one that helped the Armstrong choir raise $20,000 to go to a competition in NYC and another where he wanted to shadow three students - Hispanic, black and white - enrolled in Richmond Public Schools and chronicle their experiences and results, a story that died before it saw light because of lawyers and a necessity for endless releases.

But his real point in being there tonight was to use his self-professed "old guy" status to motivate the crowded room to action.

"Be subversive going forward in this new day. I'm pissed off and terrified. We should all be pissed off and terrified at this. We need to protest! I don't want a white supremacist a few steps from the Oval Office."

His was a very emotional call to arms not to go gently into this terrifying new Trump night and it moved me in a way Secretly Y'All doesn't usually. This wasn't about a person's personal anecdote, this was an entreaty not to stay silent about things that matter.

It's no secret, ya'll, we're being violated. Anger and action must follow.

It Sounds Terrible Because It Will Be

Luddites, billiards and a Brooklyn band, oh, my.

The Bijou was showing Werner Herzog's new documentary about the Internet, "Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World," a subject that would have seduced me - still very much a 20th century woman in many respects - even if I wasn't a devoted documentary dork, which I certainly am.

From the photographs of the long-haired scientists who came up with the Internet concept in 1969 to artificial intelligence concepts beyond my imagination like soccer playing robot cubes that one scientist expects to beat the Brazilian team by 2050 (and also creepily admits, "We love Robot 8," as he cradles the cube as if it were real), Herzog trotted out the obscure and nerdy.

That kind of thing - pure Herzog oddities- carried through the history of the Internet to hackers, Internet addicts trying to be cured and mad scientists working on self-driving cars, assuring us every time a car has an accident, all cars will learn from it and never repeat that mistake.

Really? can I be the only one who doubts this?

On the other hand, gamers helped research scientists solve molecule and helix problems they hadn't been able to, an extraordinary accomplishment only possible thanks to the Internet.

One of the weirdest, by far, was a family whose daughter had been killed in a car crash where a first responder photographed the head of the decapitated girl and made it public online.

Herzog gives us the family posed in a surreal setting with the family's other three daughters sitting catatonic-looking and overly made up in front of their parents (Mom's clearly had lots of plastic surgery and Botox, but also spouts things like, "The Internet is the manifestation of the anti-Christ"), while on the table sit three plates of baked goods, a homey reminder perhaps of this wholesome family's "before" story.

Wait, what?

We see a group of monks, all staring intently at their cell phones and completely un-involved with the world around them. The likelihood of a solar flare knocking out the Internet is a "when" not an "if" and talking heads mull over what might happen to the food supply when the Internet goes down.

Herzog's film posits that it's no longer people that matter, it's the message and we may eventually not even need humans for companionship because we'll be able to get that from A.I. "It sounds terrible, but maybe it's not," one says with little conviction.

So this is what it's come to, he seems to be telling us. Can't live with the Internet, can't live without it.

All I can say is praise be to the Bijou for landing this thought-provoking documentary by a master observer and commentator about a subject that is changing the course of human behavior.

I have little doubt that I am the sole viewer of it who still operates in the 21st century world without a cell phone, but perhaps that only makes the entire subject more relevant for me. I am the constant in a world of sea change.

Dinner followed at Greenleaf's Pool Room, unexpectedly lively with far more games of pool being played than you might expect for a Sunday evening, although it certainly wasn't a night for outdoor activities.

In short order, we plowed through two kinds of deviled eggs, Bumpkins of country ham with pimento cheese and fried chicken skin which were stellar and Spouter Inn with fried oysters, horseradish and smoked tomato that definitely did not fit easily in my mouth while pomegranate lemonade went down easily.

A thick tomato soup followed because this change of weather today has chilled me to the bone and finally, chicken skewers with a piquant slaw with enough heat for my mouth to take notice. I was taking my warmth any way I could get it tonight.

Walking into Gallery 5 moments before a last-minute show was to begin, we had timed it perfectly to catch the lovely ringing guitars and synths of California Death, the post-punk muscularity of Big Bliss from Brooklyn and the pop exuberance of Young Scum, where the drummer put on a headband before their set began because, apparently, he knew there would be sweat.

Did he have to go online to know this or did he figure it out on his own, I had to wonder? Because I'm in complete agreement with Herzog that the Internet was the beginning of the end for deep critical thinking.

And could it be that our President-elect along with the Internet is the manifestation of the anti-Christ? Post-Herzog, I see the jury as still out on that one.

Digging My Scene

What do the simple folk do on a Saturday night?

They plan to eat and partake of some death-related culture, but they also leave the ending open...just in case.

Pru and Beau picked me up not long after the sun set and our long-established banter began the moment I slammed the car door shut to escape the blustery wind that had replaced afternoon sun and warmth.

As our trio drove the short distance to the fake "town center" at Libbie Mill, we assumed our usual roles mocking and teasing each other in greeting.

"This is a dysfunctional relationship," Beau observed to neither of us in particular. "And yet we all stay," I reminded him.

Our obscenely early dinner reservation at Shagbark was required given that we had an 8:00 curtain, but it also ensured that we'd sit down in a lightly populated dining room that morphed to completely full by the time we walked out two plus hours later.

My first challenge was convincing my couple date that we wanted to drink Gavi, but doing so took both informational and anecdotal evidence.

Our server made a fine case for Gavi's strengths, but I think I finally won Beau over on the "persistent finish" (he seems to like his women the same way) and Pru when I shared that a favorite Brazilian chef drinks only red wine or Gavi (she's prone to taking a red wine drinker's opinion about a white) and a bottle soon appeared.

I got a kick seeing Morattico Creek oysters on the menu (my parents have lived in Morattico for three decades), so I told our server I had to represent with a plate of them, Tangiers and Seaside Salts to start. The Seasides were so large I almost couldn't fit one in my mouth, while the Tangiers had such a deep cup it was like they arrived in bowls.

Brown-butter basted jumbo sea scallops followed while Beau lapped up duck breast he dubbed the best duck he'd ever eaten and Pru swooned over grilled Outer Banks swordfish (set on a plate that resembled nothing so much as "The Flying Nun's" hat), mentioning to our server that it reminded her of fish she ate during summers at her family house in Rodanthe.

"We like when a table represents our food," our server joked approvingly of our waterside connections. Carrot cake of sorts (their moniker, not mine) delivered spice cake, carrot curd, rum raisins, salted caramel, cheesecake puree and praline for one of my rare non-chocolate finishes.

Tonight's play was Quill's "Assassins," a Stephen Sondheim musical I'd never even heard of, but which the director found eerily relevant when a certain major party candidate suggested to his deplorable audience that they take matters in their own hands should the other candidate win.

Some of the evening's funniest moments came courtesy of Matt Shofner's portrayal of Charles Guiteau (James' Garfield's assassin) with wild eyes, an over-the-top French accent and a dapper yellow-piped suit jacket as he spewed his character's unbridled enthusiasm.

Another laugh out loud moment arrived during intermission when a guy in the lobby caught the eye of Kenneth Putnam (playing Samuel Byck - the nut case who tried to run a plane into the Nixon White House - in a Santa Claus suit with a protest sign) and gave him the peace sign and shook his jowls side to side.

Just as hilarious a moment came when the two guys sitting next to me tried to return to their seats during intermission. I stood leaning against my raised seat to let them come through, but between my velvet pants and the velveteen covering on the seat itself, I slipped down into the seat completely unintentionally with a thud.

Pru and Beau, busy standing themselves and looking away from me, saw nothing.

But as the duo came by me, one grinned and whispered, "Real graceful!" about my unceremonious sit down. I immediately looked at him with new respect. In no time, he brought up similar problems with satin sheets (apparently the sliding factor is high) and shiny pajamas.

I don't start these oddball conversations, I just jump headfirst when invited.

When the disjointed play ended, the three of us headed east with no clue where we wanted to go to discuss what we'd just seen. The happy couple wanted caffeine, so we paused at Saison Market long enough for them to score coffee and then headed to my house to listen to music.

Knowing my audience, we started with the "Camelot" soundtrack, but not the lame movie version, but the Broadway dream cast with the dreamy 35-year old Richard Burton (how did I ever think he was an old king?), 25-year old Julie Andrews and an impossibly young-looking (27) and devastatingly handsome Robert Goulet.

I don't want to say I know my audience, but there was something for everyone: I adore the young man bravado of Lancelot's "C'est Moi," while Pru excels at the kind of female manipulation Guenevere sings of in "Take Me to the Fair" and I have no doubt that Beau subscribes to Arthur's advice on "How to Handle a Woman" sung in Burton's gravely voice of experience.

A couple of hours in - after we'd listened to the Blow Monkeys but before Art of Noise resulted in Beau's pithy comments about their distinctive sound - Beau went all serious on us, bringing up the possibility that we're watching a Facist come to power and questioning what one individual might be able to do about it.

Our mellows were harshed, but not inappropriately given the strange times we're living in, and we were back to cracking each other up before long.

When they finally stood up to leave, it hit us. In three hours of listening to music while discussing relationships, middle age and past life gaffes (how is it neither Pru nor I have ever dated a Jewish man?), we'd yet to touch on the play we'd seen, ostensibly the reason for our post-theater get-together.

It was 1:30 and we were a solid nine hours into our date, but everyone sat back down, I put on some soothing Jackson Browne and we re-opened the conversation to dissect the play in depth. That we got off on a tangent about tufted walls and put Beau through a complementary colors learning session was gravy.

And that's what simple folk do. So I'm told.

Old Dreams and New Dreams

I know you well enough that I'm certain you spent as much time as you could outside enjoying the beautiful November afternoon.

You'd better believe I did. The Barrister knew of whom he spoke.

In fact, I'd gotten up around 10:15 and been out the door, fed and ready to walk, by 11:15, which worked out nicely since I had plans to meet a friend at the VMFA at noon and it was a glorious morning to cover the distance on foot.

Yes, I'm shallow enough to be thrilled that we're the only U.S. destination for the "Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss and the Cycle of Life" show and no, I didn't know nearly enough about either artist before today's most instructive and larger than expected exhibition.

Even so, it wasn't difficult to recognize the same walkway from Munch's "The Scream" in his "Despair" painting (there was also "Angst," surprising neither of us), although I was amazed to read that there had been a major Munch retrospective at the National Gallery in 1979 and I have no memory of such a thing or why I wouldn't have gone to it.

The show, tying together Munch's incalculable influence on Johns both directly and indirectly, read like a who's who of the creative set of the era.

One of John's 1965 pieces had a Frank O'Hara poem written on it - Sputnik is only the word for travel companion here on earth - and he was friends with composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham.

His 1963 "Hatteras," with an arm print at the top, referenced the Hart Crane poem "Hatteras" and the writer's untimely death when he jumped off a ship, his arm sticking up briefly before drowning.

There was so much good high artistic drama back in those days, none of this namby-pamby Instagramming and tweeting by celebrities instead of doing something that better demonstrates their tortured souls than showing off or whining. That said, there were also several "selfies" taken by Munch that surprised us both.

My artist friend and I were far from the only attendees discussing everything we saw, although occasionally we got off topic.

Her: So he got that out of his system.
Me: Yep, worked through it and moved on.
Her: Like any good relationship...

Everything comes back to relationships. Follow me around for a day and I'll prove it.

Easily one of the most unlikely pieces in the exhibit was Johns' summer bedspread from the early 20th century, notable for its cross-hatched pattern, seen in so many of the show's paintings. Where it got eerie was seeing Munch's 1940 "Self Portrait Between Clock and Bed," because the bedspread in the picture was identical to Johns' real one.

Utility imitating art.

When we finally reached the last gallery, my friend inquired, "Are they going to have a nihilistic gift shop when we leave here?"

Nope, but by then it was lunch time, so who cared?

Amuse was almost completely full at mid-afternoon, but welcomed us to its bar for the soda of the day (strawberry vanilla), mussels and ham in butter, garlic, Parmesan and white wine broth and a special of salmon over pink-eyed peas for my friend while we compared notes on the past few weeks.

In no particular order, we covered upcoming road trips (her husband's and ours), relationships based on sex, post-election online baiting and the work of gray hallways, eventually choosing the wrong chocolate dessert even if it had a magnificent lemon curd to recommend it.

Because she's the best kind of friend, before we parted ways, she gave me a jar full of seashells she'd collected for me in September at the Outer Banks knowing they were just my style, so I walked the nearly three miles home reveling in this incredible weather and shaking a Mason jar of small purple shells.

I'd have recited the words to Crane's "Hatteras" as I walked if I'd known them, but, alas.

By the time Barr came to collect me, I'd used every scrap of sunshine and warm air available, fulfilling his prediction while leaving me resigned to a cooler evening that began at Sabai with Moo Sam Chan (because somebody was unable to resist the siren song of crispy pork belly) and Pad Broccoli (so our arteries didn't close up mid-meal or music) and managed to be in and out in just over an hour.

The parking lots near UR's Modlin Center were mobbed with cars in a way I hadn't seen since Chuck D. came to speak at the Alumni Center and we both knew it couldn't be solely because of the Steep Canyon Rangers show we were attending (although it was sold out). Turns out the problem was simultaneous shows tonight.

I'll admit, Steep Canyon Rangers was only a name I'd heard but knew nothing about beyond that they were a young North Carolina bluegrass band before Barr's invitation. So when they came out - upright bass, acoustic guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo and, yes, drums - we were both a bit surprised.

There's no percussion in bluegrass, right?

Except there is when you're talking about a group of musicians who use bluegrass instrumentation but allow the music to encompass whatever they like, whether rock, folk, jazz, Americana or a sample of the "Jeopardy" theme, among other snippets sampled by the fabulous fiddle player.

When they first walked out, banjo player Graham - he of the unexpectedly deep voice - had to bow his knees to lower himself to the microphone before raising it as he sang, saying, "It's our first show here," and smiling sheepishly. The mic immediately slid back down and he tightened it yet again.

As they began their energetic set, I couldn't help but secretly hope that these guys in narrow-legged suits were as nerdy as they appeared.

Mike shredded his mandolin like nothing I'd ever seen, each musician had lengthy solos like jazz (and the annoying attendant applause) and they about wiped up the stage when they did the title song from their new album, "Radio."

Doing what they referred to as "an old tune," they broke it down to four-part harmony with occasional additions of guitar, mandolin and banjo, a gorgeous thing to hear.

It was especially satisfying when, say the fiddle and mandolin would get into a pissing match trying to outdo each other, then the banjo would jump in and before long it resembled nothing so much as a big grass-tinged post-rock soundscape, absent vocals and soaring through Booker Hall in a completely un-bluegrass like way.

"Thanks you for having us, Richmond," they said. "We could be persuaded to come back."

I'm willing to bet that no one in the room wouldn't be willing to do the same after experiencing a band forged by bluegrass yet completely open to every genre and interpretation performed by guys with solid musical chops and unbridled youthful enthusiasm.

Despite barely over a month of friendship, the Barrister had done himself proud by choosing a stellar night of unexpected music for us to wind down Friday with.

Except, of course, you don't end a superior sunny November day with just music, you end it with conversation at Rapp Session with wine (a killer Chateau du Coing Chardonnay) and smoked bluefish dip studded with red onion and celery, smeared on Saltines.

I have been eating bluefish practically since birth and I expect I'll go out eating it.

That way, there's time to discuss violin versus fiddle, possible hiking destinations (as usual, I made a case for local trails), where to find the best selection of East Coast oysters and how our mothers managed to mangle most of the foods they cooked when we were children.

As tends to be the way when we get together, we covered the important topics: love, loss and the cycle of life, minus the Sputnik references.

The only way to know someone well enough to predict their behavior is to spend a satisfying amount of each evening together exchanging pertinent opinions and back stories.

Or figure out early on they're a sucker for sunshine and roll with it. I can be so obvious about some things...

Ginger Ale for Two

Some people I know have a "dressing drink" but I'm of the opinion that the "dressing soundtrack" is even more essential...and occasionally educational, too.

Tonight's began with hearing the Carpenters do a husky-voiced cover of "Masquerade," a song I'd always associated with George Benson, at least up until I read those Leon Russell obituaries last week and discovered it's his song, which only means now I need to hear his version.

And so the tangents began...

Listening to Karen Carpenter had me recalling a Chrissie Hynde interview from the 90s(?) where she was saying how much she idolized Karen's breath control and singing ability and tried to imitate it, a musical homage that made sense to me the moment I read it.

And sensibly is how you make your pre-theater dinner plans to ensure making an 8:00 curtain.

I never tire of taking first-timers to My Noodle and watching the look of delight on their faces when they experience the semi-privacy of the multi-level tiki booths. That they can also dish up a green curry to he who swears that he's never had a decent green curry in this town speaks volumes.

The schizophrenic soundtrack - Benny Goodman to the XX - won points with the music obsessive, while the fake fireplace just looked silly, but there's no question, I made another convert.

Of course, some would call me an idiot for turning so many people on to my fave neighborhood Chinese joint, but to share is divine, no?

My date was surprised to hear that Heritage Ensemble Theatre Company's production of "Ceremonies in Dark Old Men" was happening at Pine Camp because his only memory of it was 20 years ago and all he recalled were sports fields.

And now? Galleries, classrooms, an auditorium. Just goes to show some people don't get out quite often enough.

We got there early enough to have a good blather first, although we didn't get to the really juicy subjects until three minutes before curtain, leaving an unknown ending for the listener when a key anecdote had to be curtailed abruptly.

Cards on the table, please.

Given the small Thursday crowd, we had our pick of seats for the Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1969 play, a classic from the Harlem Renaissance according to the program. Set in 1958, it reminded me of "A Raisin in the Sun" with the same sort of characters and issues of striving and surviving.

That's how you won her. Kept her laughing.

It was all about a black family after the mother (who supports all of them) dies, telling the story of what happens once the sole employed family member, the daughter, tells her unemployed father and two brothers they have to find work or move out of the house where she pays the rent.

You can't just go around killing people and getting away with it. Who does he think he is, white?

Watching the tragicomedy unfold, I couldn't help but wonder how I'd never even heard of this important play before. Just as perplexing was seeing talent onstage that I'd never seen before, despite being a regular theater goer.

It was impossible to take your eyes off of Foree Shalom as deeply damaged and ultimate bad guy Blue Haven (in blue suits, naturally), while Toney Q. Cobb ( know, best name ever, right?) effortlessly inhabited the lazy father content to play checkers and relive his glory days on Vaudeville instead of attracting customers to his empty barber shop.

Ain't nothing meaner than an American-born cracker.

Watching a play like this, I couldn't help but be grateful to Heritage Ensemble for satisfyingly producing a classic piece of black theater that deserves to be seen by audiences of all colors still dealing with the same racial issues 47 years later.

Who the hell ever told every black woman she was some kind of goddam savior?

For that matter, who the hell doesn't have an "undressing soundtrack" when possible? "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" winds up being Yo la Tengo's extended goodnight. Fitting.