Quelle Night!

I'm clawing my way back from illness to my real life.

After seeing "Breakfast at Tiffany's" for only the first time in 2010, I  felt compelled to revisit it today at the Bowtie. With some films, once is enough. I sensed I could do this one twice.

A crowd of mostly women (no surprise there) showed up to revel in director Blake Edwards' take on single girl life in NYC circa 1961. Clothes, hats, gloves: tres magnifique.

Overcrowded and enthusiastic party scene in Holly Golightly's tiny apartment: worth emulating in my own and now on my make-happen list, minus the police raid.

Verbal habit I intend to adopt: quelle! As in, quelle bore! I feel certain Pru will go along with me on this one.

In what surely must be the greatest possible leap from there, part of my afternoon was spent at the River City Barn Dance at Hardywood. You read that right, a square dance.

I'm part of a generation that actually square danced as part of P.E. in both elementary school and junior high, so it's not like I haven't done the Virginia Reel or the Texas Star before.

Technically, I was there to interview Grant, the caller, the guy who calls out the instructions for each dance and we did that under a sunny sky at a picnic table outside.

But once I was back inside waiting for the dance to begin, he approached me to ask if he could "borrow" me. "I can't imagine a move in my head," he explained and if he couldn't imagine it, he couldn't call it.

It was a sashay and it involved "rolling the lady." Since I couldn't recall ever being rolled, I was game. His left hand took my right and his right my left across our bodies and just like that, I was sashaying across in front of him and back, right to left and left to right.

I enjoyed everything about being rolled. Now I recalled what I'd liked about all those P.E. dance classes: boys and girls on the dance floor. Maybe I was born to sashay.

Dinner was served at Amour where the new menu offered up a mushroom casserole of mixed local mushrooms, white wine, garlic, parsley and shallots, a perfectly lovely combination of local fungi and fresh greens accompanied by the house standard-bearer, Willm Cremant d'Alsace Rose, and an amen from a nearby couple enjoying Chateaux Neuf du Pape ("Pink bubbles are the best!").

Of course, it was also from them that I overheard the comment, "You don't have any stories because you don't have any friends," a rather cruel observation.

Rumor had it that my friend Holmes had occupied the same bar stool as me the night before and I honored his presence with plenty of bubbly.

My main dish, accompanied by gypsy jazz overhead, was beef cheeks braised with onion, cumin carrots (divine!), spaetzle and red onions, the cheeks so tender and flavorful as to make a cheek convert out of the most conservative eater. Accompanied by Fleur des Templiers Malbec 2014, it was a perfectly matched course.

While enjoying Scott Bradley's "Post-Modern Jukebox" and savoring a dessert of profiteroles, housemade strawberry and mango sorbet, we discussed royalties, "Blurred Lines" and Destiny's Child versus Beyonce (not the same thing) and the upcoming show at the National.

I was having such a fabulous time at the bar chatting that I almost lost track of time and I had somewhere to be at 11.

And not just anywhere, but at Metzger for my very favorite DJ, Mr. Fine Wine. Arriving right as he began spinning 45s, I was immediately caught up in his web of vintage soul. And it's a tangled and talented web he weaves.

My date was good enough to ensure that I had Hugl Rose and a table on which to rest my stuff, but with Mr. Fine Wine, it's the music that matters.

Over the course of three hours, I danced with every available wriggling backside: the chanteuse, the chef, the record collector, the artist, the DJ's wife, and goodness only knows how many complete strangers. Hugs were offered from bartenders, restaurant owners, neighbors and ad agency owners.

I can't imagine anyone was surprised to see me. I shouldn't have been surprised at how much Hugl Rose was consumed while dancing and chatting up friends.

The thing is, Mr. Fine Wine pulls the choicest soul 45s and every single one requires dancing. No slow song grinding here. I finally felt compelled to go tell him that I was a devotee of his podcasts and got a major hug in return.

Just like last time he came to play in Richmond, we reached a point when it became necessary to fully open all the restaurant windows to allow cool air to enter the room, but also this time I was told, "Your blog is the zeitgeist of Richmond. We need to have lunch." You pay, maybe I will.

Like last time, I had an absolute blast dancing, sometimes with girlfriends, sometimes with my stationary date. A nearby guy introduced himself as new to Richmond (6 months from Nashville) and invited me outside for a smoke. Thanks, no.

I finished the night with a Cazadores and a dance with the owner for good luck. She thanked me for coming and I was grateful for an evening of absolutely stellar soul music. You couldn't have paid me to be anywhere else but downtown Soulville tonight.

Baby, put your good dress on. You better believe I did. Come back, Mr. Fine Wine. We are your devoted.

Or at least I am.

Yes, I Do Windows

There are art nerds and then there are hopeless art nerds and my photographer friend and I definitely qualify as the latter.

After we finished seeing the Tiffany exhibit at the VMFA back in June here, we (like probably a bazillion other visitors to that show) picked up a sheet mentioning that Virginia was full of Tiffany windows available for public viewing.

But unlike those who tossed that sheet or forgot all about it, we were determined to start the process of seeing them all, beginning with Blandford Church in Petersburg.

So on this beautiful rain-washed and windswept day, we took a leisurely drive down Route 1 past the trailer parks and tiendas to see what Tiffany had wrought in the name of Civil War memorial windows.

Our intention had been to eat at the Dixie Diner, but once again they were closed ("You just never know when they're going to be open," we were told), so we headed to nearby Longstreet's Deli and a sunny window table.

Today's special was a half club sandwich, cup of soup (Italian wedding, chicken/sausage gumbo or French onion) and fripps ("They're our house-made fried potato chips, but they're addicting," our server warned us).

And although I enjoy a good club sandwich, I rarely order one because it ends up being too much.

So a half sounded great (as did cheese-covered soup since the temperature had dropped 17 degrees since I'd walked this morning).

And, for the record, the thick sliced fripps were delicious, with far more potato taste than a typical house made chip

We ate and watched the clouds tearing across the sky as if they had somewhere to be, like Nebraska.

It was almost like an artsy time-lapse shot in a movie to indicate the passage of time, except that not much time was passing.

Arriving at Blandford, we were met by the Ladies Memorial Association decorating committee, two welcoming women working on the Visitors' Center Christmas tree.

When they learned that we were there because of the VMFA exhibit, we became the star visitors.

Apparently they had hoped to get a lot of residual guests as a result of the VMFA show but that hasn't really been the case.

Pity, really, because Blandford's windows made for as soul-satisfying an afternoon as did the museum show, with the bonus of being in a 1735 church with a glorious wooden vaulted ceiling.

Our tour guide, a charming women who's been doing it for five years and willingly gave her age as 76, provided more than facts and encouraged the closest possible viewing points so as not to miss a nuance of the works of art.

When the Ladies' Memorial Association began the project to restore the abandoned church as a memorial chapel in 1901, they conceived a plan where each of the Confederate States would provide funds for a window in memory of that state's Confederate dead.

For each window of the planned size for the chapel, Tiffany was charging $1800 at the time.

For this project, he dropped his price to $300 per window with a $35 packing/shipping/installation fee. It boggles the mind today.

Additionally, the faces, hands and feet of the saints depicted in each of the windows were hand-painted by artisans for the most realistic detail possible. In many cases, tiny painted rounds of glass were added at the last moment to add a three-dimensional element to the image.

We were astounded to learn that these magnificent windows had gone uncovered until the 1980s when Plexiglas was put on the outside of them.

Seventy years of Tiffany masterpieces undisturbed, not stolen, not shot out, with no rocks thrown through. Surely that's some sort of cosmic gift.

Up close with today's brilliant sunshine streaming through Tiffany's Opaline and gem-like colored-windows was even better than the VMFA exhibit in some ways.

The proximity, the natural light and the cohesiveness of the windows' themes were breath-taking.

The only state that hadn't managed to raise funds for a window was Kentucky, so Tiffany had created a small window with a cross on it in honor of the state's dead and charged the ladies only $100 for it.

Neutral states Maryland and Arkansas had smaller windows as well.

Walking out through first the Colonial cemetery and then the Civil War cemetery was like being in a rolling sea of gravestones.

After the war, when the Union made no provision to bury the Confederate dead, the L.M.A. spent twenty years burying 30,000 men's bodies in the hilly back of the church.

We were both surprised to learn that although Blandford is no longer an active parish, you can still be married there and buried in the cemetery ("You can end it either way here," one of us quipped).

Driving back out, I asked my friend if he wanted to be buried because I know I intend to be cremated.

"And scattered where?" he asked.

I think I'll leave that to the scatterer, presuming that he'll know me well enough to know my mind.

The Importance of Applying Lipstick

With a tenuous tie-in to the current Tiffany exhibit, the VMFA showed Breakfast at Tiffany's this morning and (painful admission) since I'd never seen the movie all the way through, I felt compelled to improve my cultural literacy about it.

Other attendees were far more into it, a few younger ones even wearing black sheaths, pearls and opera-length gloves (sadly, no cigarette holders).

As we were leaving, I heard one woman say to her friend, "I can't believe I saw that the year I graduated high school."

It was indeed a wide-ranging audience.

NYC, as seen through the 1961 sanitized lens of director Blake Edwards, was a thing of beauty: angular, leafy and clean.

As always, I was enthralled with the period details of it all.

The cabs all had serious fins on them. The concession stand in Central Park sold frankfurters for twenty cents. Men gave their dates money when they went to the powder room. Enormous card catalogs were still in use in the public library.

Women wore gloves at parties and hats everywhere. Flashbulbs went off when photographers snapped a picture.

Of course, the movie was rife with just as much political incorrectness as mid-century charm.

Especially notable were the ethnic stereotyping of Asians (as played by Mickey Rooney, of all people?) and people smoking everywhere (including in cabs and when being brought before the magistrate on narcotics charges).

I also loved the dialog, not surprisingly since the source material was Truman Capote's book.

There's clarity in a line like, "It's useful being top banana in the shock department."

But knowing how so much of the book was put through the Hollywood sanitizer, I was curious about what got left out of Holly's character.

But parts of her I instinctively understood with no further research necessary.

"A girl can't read that sort of thing without her lipstick," could have been written about me.

I've found that it's always best to apply some Witty Fuchsia before attempting anything challenging.

Holly: Do you think she's talented; deeply and importantly talented?
Paul: No, amusingly and superficially talented, yes. But deeply and importantly, no.

 Personally, I'd settle for deeply and amusingly talented.

But I'm no Holly Golightly either.