A Natural, Zesty Enterprise

It was like walking into a secret society without knowing the password.

Granted, no reasonably cultured woman of my age should have lived this long without seeing "The Big Lebowski," but I somehow had. And it's not because it was a Coen Brothers film, either, because I've seen plenty of them: "Fargo," "Barton Fink," "No Country for Old Men," "Hail Caesar," "Inside Llewyn Davis," "Raising Arizona," "Blood Simple," "Barton Fink."

Okay, nowhere near all of them, but plenty.

And let's not forget that in 1998, "The Big Lewbowski" was just another Coen Brothers movie and not even a blockbuster at that. Besides having lost my taste for big Hollywood movies by then (I also didn't see "Saving Private Ryan" or "There's Something About Mary" that year), I was busy seeing films like "Shakespeare in Love" and "Run, Lola, Run."

Let the movie snob ribbing begin.

But given how "The Big Lewbowski" has grown in stature to a cult film, I was at least savvy enough to know I needed to see it for the sake of cultural references. I'd been aware that for the past three years the Byrd Theatre had held a "Big LeByrdski" screening, but never made it there. So when I saw that this was the 20th anniversary of the movie, I resolved to up my cultural literacy.

Like I said, I was entering a zone for which I had no credentials. Countless people had come dressed as characters in the movie which means beyond the Dude, I had no idea who they were supposed to be. In theory, they were dressed up so they could participate in the costume contest, but since there were more costumes than participants, I sense that dressing the part was just part of the fun.

Hello "Rocky Horror Picture Show."

Byrd manager Todd not only wore a Dude-like sweater but danced the part before his introduction of the film. He also insisted we chant "The Byrd abides!" three times before instructing the projectionist to start the movie, saying, "Let's see what condition our condition is in!"

The near capacity crowd ate it up with a spoon, belched and ate some more.

They cheered and clapped as soon as the title appeared. They hooted and hollered at the mention of "El Duderino," not surprising since many of them were sucking back Center of the Universe's "El Duderino," a White Russian-inspired beer. And while I should have expected it, they repeated lines verbatim along with the actors on the screen.

I got it, the rug really tied the room together.

A guy in the row behind us also sang every song in the movie, word for word, which got annoying, especially during a Creedence Clearwater Revival song because they're a band I can't stand. On the other hand, I felt a kinship with the Dude when he said, "I hate the f*ckin' Eagles, man," given I've been hating on that band since the '70s. So we had that bond.

Certainly the writing was at times hilarious. When John Goodman's character Walter nonchalantly and maniacally tells the Dude, "You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me...Hell, I can get you a toe by 3:00 this afternoon. With nail polish. These f*ckin' amateurs," I was laughing as hard as anyone.

Even an unlikely detail like the Dude's car spoke to me since I took Driver's Ed in an early '70s four door Ford Torino.

But when all was said and done, after taking in the superb casting - I only wished John Turturro's character Jesus had been in more scenes and seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a toadie was mesmerizing - the unexpectedly elaborate dream sequences, the complete surprise of Sam Elliott being in the movie, I was left shrugging.

This is what all the hoopla has been about?

Granted, my reaction might have been different had I seen it in 1998. With several references to Saddam Hussein, Bush and Reagan, it was very much art of its time and certainly the political incorrectness of it placed it squarely in the '90s.

Which is where I shall leave it to rest, having finally, if temporarily, joined the close-knit Lebowski clan for one brief evening. I am not worthy to put on a bathrobe, sip White Russians and recite dialog along with true fans.

Am I wrong? Am I wrong? Okay then.

Picture That

If there's anything tonight proved, it's that Richmond is not only a photography town but a film town.

Both intersected in Carytown tonight for the Richmond premiere of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Finding Vivian Maier" about the Chicago street photographer whose 150,000+ negatives weren't discovered until after her death.

I know I wasn't the only one who'd been wondering since last March if the documentary would ever play Richmond. And goodness knows, I was one of the scores who first saw a small part of the cache of Maier photographs online a few years ago and marveled at this unknown woman's eye and talent.

Like so many fantastic events that happen in Richmond, this one got its start in my neighborhood, Jackson Ward, at the only photography gallery in town. Gallerist Gordon wanted to bring the film to his Candela Gallery, hoping to draw maybe 40 artsy types. I can assure you I would have been one of them.

Seeing assistance to make it happen, he went to the film-obsessed guys who are trying to get the Bijou - a small 100-120 seat repertory theater - up and running here. They saw the potential to not only bring the film, but use it as a fundraiser for both the Bijou and Richmond's landmark movie palace, the venerable Byrd Theater.

That event alone would have made for a terrific Sunday evening, but things kept growing. Soon an after-party was planned with local legends Chez Roue planning to play their next-to-last show in Richmond at NY Deli immediately after the film.

Then Gordon arranged to have a dozen or so of Maier's prints on loan from a gallery in NYC for viewing at Portrait House before the screening. All of a sudden, it was all Vivian Maier, all the time. Or, at least, for 7 1/2 hours tonight.

I wouldn't have missed it for the world despite temperatures that felt like 11 degrees and the cruelest wind I can recall in years.

After meeting a friend for dinner (and a discussion of the word frigid and its now almost archaic use to describe women), I made a detour to Chop Suey Books to use a birthday gift certificate to pick up a new book I'd seen a review of last week. "1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music" sounded like just my kind of read and luckily for me, they had a copy in stock.

Book in hand, it was on to Portrait House where we were eager to see Maier prints in the flesh. The place was mobbed with others just as eager, so we waited our turn to get close enough to Gordon for him to flip through the large-format matted photographs, each as riveting as the last.

I don't care if this woman worked as a nanny for 40 or 400 years, she clearly had a photographer's eye.

Once we'd seen them, we stepped aside to allow others in for a viewing. In the back, we met a relative newcomer to Richmond, here only a year since moving down from Pennsylvania, and almost giddy with excitement about tonight's film.

The funny part was, he hadn't known about it until this morning when he'd seen a flyer at Globehopper while scoring coffee. I'd bought my ticket weeks ago so as to be sure I didn't miss out. And here we both were, equally thrilled about it.

Given the biting wind and frigid temperatures, it was far from the ideal night to have to stand in a line that ran to the end of the block and around the corner, but with no choice, we made for the end of the line. I soon heard my name called and a favorite couple (he's a photographer and she's a student of pop culture) appeared to join us.

For that matter, once we made it inside, the number of friends I saw was overwhelming. It seemed like everyone was at the Byrd tonight: history geeks, print-makers, prickly types, DJs, authors, Romans and countrymen.

Turns out there were 900+ people crowding the Byrd and overflowing up into the balcony. That's a nice chunk of fundraising and a solid testament to the community's interest in the film.

But the weather and wind had taken its toll not just on my freezing legs but also on the loading door behind the Byrd, which had blown off during a screening of "Annie" earlier. Richmond, we just don't do winter well.

Before the main event, they showed "The Critic," an Oscar-winning Mel Brooks animated short from 1963 with enough hilarious dialog to get everyone chuckling at his commentary about art and modernity.

I think I knew going in that I was going to be fascinated by the documentary because I could have been happy watching an hour and 24 minutes of just her photographs. But listening to the people who employed her as a nanny and the now grown children she'd watched just provided additional reasons to find the story so compelling.

How could she have been so driven to take thousands of pictures without making an effort to have them shown? How would she feel about her pictures being shared now? Why did she hoard newspapers? Was her pseudo-French accent an affectation?

For a documentary dork like me, as many questions were raised as were answered and that's fine, too.

Afterwards, my friends went home and I went next door to NY Deli to hear Chez Roue for the last time. It was packed in there, but the music was rollicking and everyone eager to talk about what we'd just seen.

Sharing a film in a public space has always been the bedrock of the American film experience. No one will ever convince me that watching a movie at home with stops for bathroom breaks and food runs is anything like a genuine film experience.

Which is exactly why we need the Bijou. I don't want to just read about amazing films, I want them to have a place to play in Richmond where I can watch them with 100 or so of my closest strangers (or people I know, I won't discriminate).

Because if 900 people come out on a blustery, nearly sub-zero work night to see a documentary about a dead nanny with a Rolleiflex, we are most definitely a film town.

Historical Conquesting at Groovin' and GayRVA

My, my, my. When it rains, it pours. Fortunately I love a rainy spell because, metaphorically speaking, it's been a deluge. Every time I've turned around for the past week, I've been met with another unexpected and exciting situation or possibility. I still haven't ruled out the possibility of my head exploding.

The evening began in the shade of the sound booth at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. The bulk of the audience was sitting in the blazing sun and I spread my pink blanket in a shaded oasis with built-in conversational partners, the sound guys. How do I get so lucky?

Sahara Smith was up first with her ethereal voice and only a fellow guitarist accompanying her. All kinds of love and heartbreak songs followed. Her comment, "I wrote this song because I was broke on Valentine's Day. But I think I would have written it anyway," about summed up her attitude about romance. I will always enjoy listening to a fellow hopeless romantic.

Mason Jennings followed with a lively and often amusing set and then the man of the evening graced us with his presence. Josh Ritter played Groovin' in the Garden last year (I'll keep your dirty little secret about that, Andrew) and immediately acknowledged it by saying, "Last time we were here, it rained like hell. Thanks for coming back." As if there was any question?

I love his latest CD So Runs the World Away (although, for an album title, he'll never top The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter), so I couldn't have been more thrilled when his second song was "Change of Time." The song is pure poetry to someone like me.

I had a dream last night
And when I opened my eyes
Your shoulder blade, your spine
Were shorelines in the moonlight
New worlds for the weary
New lands for the living
I could make it if I tried
I closed my eyes, I kept on swimming

Sigh. He followed that with "Rumors" and then "Folk Blood Bath" and the tone was set for the evening. I was in a great place when I gathered up my pink blanket to pick up my "date" and head to Carytown.

When we arrived at New York Deli for the GayRVA first birthday party, it was in full swing. The theme was Hello Cupcake! and while there were plenty of people we wanted to say hello to, there were a few we wanted just as much to avoid. My friend is funny; she's not quite as outgoing as I am, but everyone knows her, so we eventually had to escape to the patio, where I got to see the handsome Elliott in his briefs ("What are you looking at first?" he challenged me. "What do you think?" I countered).

We said hi to the girls we know in Cherry Bomb, I gave another friend every delicious detail of the Josh Ritter show he'd missed and I ran into a restaurant owner who once employed one of my exes. There was no shortage of people to talk to as we wedged ourselves through the crowd.

One Maker's Mark and ginger and one Tres Generations later, it was time to change locations, so we crossed the street to Bonvenu where the dinner crowd was down to just a couple of tables and the bar staff seemed happy to see us. Vino Verde was poured so that the discussion could begin.

My friend summed it up perfectly. "How is it we don't see each other for only four days and we've both got big stuff to share?" If I knew the answer to that, I'd also know why strangers propose to me on the street or why guys unfriend me on Facebook when I won't date them (that'll show her!). It's a mad, mad world, I'm afraid.

One of the servers at Bonvenu was celebrating her birthday, although it was the anniversary of her breasts and not her birth. Seems she feels that "the girls" deserve a day of their own to commemorate the day they arrived on her body. She refers to one as Marilyn and the other as Monroe, and has a specific drink she makes to celebrate: champagne and grenadine, sort of a grown-up Shirley Temple, which she refers to as a Mingles Monroe. She insisted we "mingle" with her and who were we to argue? Pink drinking? We're in.

But eventually even they had to close and we moved to an undisclosed location to further the evening with a bottle of Sancerre and a discussion of how to wow a guy with a mix tape, what to wear on an unofficial first date and the best way to respond to an encouraging text from an appealing source.

If it hadn't already been almost 2 a.m., we might have gone on and solved everyone else's problems too. As it was, we decided that it may be time for some historical conquests of our own.

My Life Will Look so Good in Death (I Hope)

When I went to visit my parents earlier this week, my mom unexpectedly gave me a big box containing all the letters and cards I'd ever sent her. Being the phone-phobe that I am, when I moved to rva in 1986, our primary means of communicating was letter-writing and unbeknownst to me, she'd saved them all.

I've only begun to look through them, but I can already tell what an in-depth archive of my life and what was happening culturally they're going to be. I wrote her about everything that interested me, it would appear. And as has been noted by more than one person in my lifetime, I never use a sentence when a paragraph will do.

Which brings us to the trunks of Mary Custis Lee, the second child of Robert E. Lee and the topic of today's Banner lecture at the Virginia Historical Society. "Hidden Treasures: A Short History of the Mary Custis Lee Trunks" was about the recently discovered trunks containing over 6500 items, such as journals, letters, invitations and tickets of a woman who held a crucial role in archiving her famous family's ephemera.

The letters from her father during the Civil War were fascinating for their honesty; as early as 1861, he wrote her advising that people should "plan for a several-years war." In an 1862 letter he was quite adamant about his troops not considering themselves beaten at Sharpsburg, although I'm not sure the Union troops would have agreed with his assessment.

About getting the government to return the Lee family possessions taken from Arlington House during the war, he wrote about the delay in getting things done in Washington, D.C., "But in Washington, it often takes many days to accomplish a little." The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The lecture was given by long-time VHS staffer E. Lee Shepard, who closed the talk by saying, "Thank you for coming and thank you for staying." It was a reference to his talk being a replacement for the originally planned speaker, a U.K. resident who was trapped at home by the volcanic ash ramifications. Shepard's closing quip was especially appropriate because there were some attendees who, on learning of the change in topic/speakers at the door, actually turned on their heels and left. My nerdy friend and I were glad we'd stayed for such an interesting and poignant talk.

Afterwards, we lunched on the patio at New York Deli and I had their excellent Southwestern Cobb salad, a tasty take on the traditional version with its guacamole, salsa and baby corn in addition to the usual Cobb suspects. I shared the contents of some of my letters to my mother, but it was tough to compete with what Mary Custis Lee had accumulated in her trunks. I mean, the woman had invitations to hang with Queen Victoria.

I can only hope that when I die, my letters, tickets, journals and what-not tell a story of a life half as well-lived as hers. Believe me, I'm working on it.

NY Deli Brunch & Haiti Benefit @ The Byrd

Waiting out front for my friend to pick me up for brunch today, I saw a car coming west on Clay, turning south on Henry Street, and ignoring the Do Not Enter sign without so much as a sideways glance (it's actually one way north).

It seemed like a good analogy for my 2010 strategy: try a new way, see what happens and just hope nobody gets hurt.

We were off to Carytown and NYD for brunch and it was mobbed.

As it turned out, most of the people were, like me, headed to the Haiti Benefit at the Byrd at 2.

The host tried to discourage us from coming in because the kitchen was so backed up, but we took our chances at the bar and it worked out just fine, food and time-wise.

I'd chosen NYD because I was in a deli mood, so I got the Patty Melt because the burger, sauteed onions and rye bread combination was calling to me.

Unlike me, my friend hadn't yet had breakfast, so he went the Western Omelet route.

The bartender mistakenly brought me fries instead of chips, but laughed it off as her free appetizer offering for the slowness of the food.

"You looked like you could use some fries, " she told me. Who couldn't, I asked my friend, sharing my bounty.

Looking around as we ate, I noticed for the first time their terrific cocktail shaker and flask collection adorning the back of the bar.

Shades of The Thin Man.

After eating, I went next door and my friend headed home.

The film, Ghosts of Cite Soleil was both a mocumentary as well as containing actual news footage of the political unrest and gang warfare in Haiti up until the coup d'etat in 2004.

Before the film , the audience was warned of the graphic imagery and that this was not appropriate viewing for children (I didn't see any) and it wasn't.

The street gangs in this poorest of countries were at times arrogant and at others, resigned to their fate in such a place.

It was powerful stuff, especially aided by the Wyclef Jean score.

Since I don't watch TV, all the images I've seen of the earthquake has been in print.

There was a video montage sponsored by the Carytown Merchants' Association that preceded the film, showing the recent devastation in Haiti, set to Coldplay's Fix You.

It was a cold dose of reality before the scene-setting horror of Ghosts of Cite Soleil.

The five dollar benefit admissions seemed like such a small contribution to make toward such an enormous cause.

Walking home from the Byrd to J-Ward was a pleasure, given the mid-50s temperature (even without the sun), and gave me some time to digest the brunch and movie.

Here I was hoping for some change in my own life while the lives of an entire country were unwittingly changed for them in moments and undoubtedly forever.

Never mind about me, after all.

Of Punctuality and Punctuation

Here's the problem with being punctual: you do it for a lifetime and people start to expect it from you.

I'm not kidding.

If you're never late meeting up with someone, they assume the worst when you do arrive a bit late.

It happened to me a couple weeks ago when I was supposed to be meeting a friend at 2, but my noon lunch ran long and it was closer to 2:30 when I got there.

Good god, he'd called out the militia and S.W.A.T. teams before the cat dragged me in.

Today I was meeting up with my English teacher friend for happy hour at New York Deli and I was 12 minutes late.

By that point, he'd already tweeted that he was getting worried and wondering if he had the date wrong in his calendar.

Twelve minutes!

He'd also arrived early, so maybe it just felt like a longer wait, but, as he pointed out, I'm usually early, so anything past the fixed time is worrisome.

We moved beyond the social constructs of time and had a most enlightening chat while we scarfed sliders and basket 'o fries.

And since we're both such blogging geeks, we talked numbers and comparisons, lurkers and followers (he has a killer photography blog at: http://blog.punchphoto.com/ ).

We actually talked grammar and spelling.

He shared a story about a short-lived but passionate relationship he'd had at 25.

I shared a story about a newly-single friend having far more luck with the opposite sex more quickly than I am.

By this point, we were surrounded by a gathering of what we think was realtors, drinking and glad-handing each other- our signal that it was time to clear out.

We also noted that we have gone out together more in 2009 than in the first six years of knowing each other.

About damn time we both made room in our lives for someone whose company we so greatly enjoy.

Hey, I'm talking to you.