Goomah-ya

Sometimes a week gets off to a slow start and all my looking for something to do yields nada.

Fortuitously, there are always the old Monday standbys, Stuzzi and RVA Big Band.

Because they're so reliably there to kick off the week, Monday in and Monday out, it's easy to take them for granted, like a dogged but annoying always freind when you're bored.

But after spending indiscriminately all weekend, there's a lot of appeal to a $2 margarita pizza.

Another thrifty type and I arrived late in the game to find only two seats free at the bar and Katherine Hepburn in "Summertime" playing on the screens.

The scenes of Venice in 1955 were fascinating, with far fewer tourists and far fewer signs of modernity.

Once our pizzas were ordered, we fell into conversation with a nearby man, who'd apparently had enough wine to open up about his love life.

He told us about the three women he's currently seeing, explaining that each one fulfilled a different need in him.

Specifically, he mentioned how important sexual chemistry was and why it sometimes necessitates a partner just for that.

"She's like a goomah," one of the three Italians said, with another chiming in, "Like a mistress."

I said it sounded like a booty call to me, someone you just wanted to have sex with.

Suddenly the woman sitting behind us, who'd introduced us to her Italian boyfriend earlier, spun around in her stool, grinning.

"It sounds like an ex-girlfriend," she said, making the international symbol for texting.

All at once is was a free-for-all on the laws of attraction and mating in general, especially at middle age.

The woman told us how in high school, she lived with her Dad, with him on the third floor and her on the first.

"That way, I couldn't ask him who's car was parked in front of the house because I really didn't want to know," she confessed.

That must have made for some enlightening teen years.

Pizza and wine gone, we wanted a sweet finish to the meal, ordering the Italian doughnuts, excuse me, zeppole with Nutella/mascarpone.

The cinnamon sugar on the outside gave way to a dense interior, a bit heavier than it probably should have been, but still quite tasty.

One by one the others got going, the one couple inciting jealousy in the rest of us when they said they were leaving for five weeks in Italy tomorrow.

Sigh.

Five weeks! She looked positively giddy at the prospect, while for him, it was just going home to Mama in Piedmonte.

We left soon after to go to Balliceaux and hear the RVA Big Band for the first time in ages.

They were swinging hard when we walked in and found seats on the back banquette with a clear view of the 17 musicians.

The beauty of the RVA Big Band is simple moments, like when the drummer takes off on an extended solo, giving the bass player time to grab his PBR and take a couple of long pulls on it before anything further is expected of him.

We were late, so their set ended not long after, giving me time to say hello to some of my favorite people, friends I hadn't expected to see there tonight.

One was celebrating her birthday, happily loopy and looking radiant in a long, blue dress.

Her best line: "Yea, but I'm a lazy hippie."

Yea, but aren't we all?

When one of the trumpet players came down to talk to the couple next to me, I couldn't help but overhear him tell them about how the band practices.

"There's not exactly practice," he admitted. "We get a list of the music we're going to play the day before and that's how we know what to practice."

The couple looked surprised and I felt the same, although I have to assume that at a certain level of musicianship, if you all know your parts, it's bound to come together.

And it did so most sublimely on Johnny Mercer's "Skylark," a song that had me imagining a man smoking at a window, looking out on the nighttime urban skyline and thinking of a woman.

Since I didn't recognize it, I turned to the guy sitting next to me (because he looked like a musician) and asked what it was.

He not only told me the name and composer, but that its lyrics reflected Mercer's longing for Judy Garland, with whom he'd had an affair.

So here we were back to unavoidable sexual chemistry and longing for a woman you can't have.

Just another reliably good Monday night in the city.

Italian Philosophy

Life is like a doughnut.

Tonight that doughnut was actually a zeppole because it's Lent.

I know that only because not one, but two restaurant owners I know have told me they've given up red wine for Lent.

A Catholic friend finds it hysterical that you can give up one color or another wine instead of actually making a sacrifice and just, oh, say, give up wine altogether.

I don't know about that but I am Italian-savvy enough to know that zeppoles are only baked after Ash Wednesday.

And while I'm certainly not up on my religious holidays, I did walk by a church on Grace Street last Wednesday that said, "Ash Wednesday, Come in for Quiet Reflection."

I'm not much on ashes or quiet reflection, but I'm all about the custard-filled doughnuts Stuzzi makes every Lenten season.

So after dutifully finishing my margherita pizza and Primitivo, I happily shared with an Italian all that dough and cream and powdered sugar that are a metaphor for life.

The hard part outside with the reward inside and just enough sweetness all around to keep you coming back for more.

I'm thinking life just may be as simple as that.

Who Are You and What is This Limoncello ?

I thought I'd gone to the VMFA for the Collector's Circle lecture, "The New Art of Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" to make up for my last heartbreaking visit there.

You see, when I visited Boston in Fall 2008, the museum was closed for renovations and I'd been terribly disappointed at missing the chance to see their world-renowned collection.

So naturally I wanted to come hear about the $504 million dollar expansion that had thwarted me and now housed the premiere collection of American art.

In one of those unlikely coincidences that define my life, I ended up sitting next to and conversing with a woman who had been born in Hampton, VA but lived 40 years in Cape Cod and then Plymouth and had just moved to Richmond. She said she moved here because she missed Spring and said it was gray in Plymouth until Memorial Day.

She was there out of guilt; she hadn't been to the Boston Museum in 20 years and it was half an hour from her house. A poker face is not my strong suit; I'm sure my amazement was written all over my face.

So she was taking the opportunity to get a preview of the enormous new wing as an enticement to make it to the museum the next time she's up there. I certainly did my best to further guilt her into it.

Together we listened to Dr. Elliot Bostwick describe the 3,000 new pieces the museum had acquired since 2001, making for a collection that spans the art of the Americas from 900 B.C. to the twentieth century (including a blank bowl Jackson Pollock had painted while he was undergoing detox and Jungian therapy).

She showed pictures of workers dissembling period rooms from the old addition, numbering and photographing them, only to painstakingly reassemble them in the new wing. Numbering bricks, no wonder the museum had been closed when I was there.

After the lecture, my new friend thanked me sincerely for the art pep talk. Just doing my job, ma'am. Now on to some nourishment after all that enlightenment.

It had been ages since I was at Stuzzi and since I was right there, I set my taste buds for pizza. I walked into a full bar except for one seat and the guy next to it extended his hand toward it in welcome.

Debating over which salad to start with, my seatmate, the stranger, suggested the arugula with shaved Parmigiana while I picked a glass of wine.

There was no decision to be made about the pizza because it was $1 Margarita night, so the bartender automatically assumes everyone at the bar is there for that. And actually, everyone was, so why shouldn't I jump on board?

I have to say, my salad was spot on, a generously-sized serving of peppery arugula, not overdressed and loaded with fresh cheese. My pizza arrived before I could finish it and I kept right on with my salad because it was too good to stop. Besides, pizza doesn't have to be hot to be enjoyable.

The stranger turned out to be a musician in a local band I'd seen at, of all things, a raucous and raunchy Christmas show (he'd been the baby Jesus) at the Firehouse several years ago. He asked if I'd been at the performance where he got naked, but, alas, I hadn't. I'm sure I would have remembered that.

The turnover was constant at the bar as people came in, ate their Margarita with their drink and left. Soon a wine-lover and her beau sat down on the other side of me and she was all about me having a glass of her wine

Since it was Masi Costasera Amarone (and $75 a bottle), I was only too happy to oblige her. It didn't hurt that it was my kind of wine, with nice acidity, soft tannins, good structure and a long finish. If you insist, I will drink your lovely wine with you. And she did, so I did.

It was at that point, as the lightening was flashing non-stop, that I had the pleasure of my first Zeppole doughnut with custard and strawberry sauce.

Being a heathen, I was unfamiliar with the traditional St. Joseph's Day cake, made and served on March 19 and available from then only until Easter.

The owner told me that in NYC and Italy, people wait in lines at the bakeries to score these taste delights during their limited availability.

The fried dough had been sliced in half and an ample amount of custard spread between the halves with a thin topping of strawberry glaze on top. The former stranger who now knew me by name gallantly volunteered to help me finish it.

Before the zeppole completely disappeared, the sky opened up and the rain fell so hard we couldn't see across the street. Despite having finished dessert, it didn't seem like a wise time to exit the building.

Luckily, I got more incentive to stay, this time from a guy at the end of the bar who asked if he could buy me a Limoncello. To his great surprise and delight, I had never had one; he got one promptly delivered to me and one to my amazed seatmate ("It's wearing the dress, isn't it?" he wondered. Hell if I know).

There's a lot to recommend sipping what tasted like an alcoholic Lemonhead while watching a downpour from inside a dimly-lit pizza joint. The Red Hot Chili Peppers soundtrack was all wrong, but overall it had been an evening of surprises from all these people I didn't know.

Once again, I must have on my stranger magnet without even realizing it.