It started with my three-hour deep-tissue massage on Friday night, which left me bruised and exhausted but able to turn my head again like an actual human. And I slept like the dead—the head-movin’, locomotion-enabled dead—the moment I got home.
On Saturday I met my friend Jamey for a trip through the Swedish American Museum in Andersonville. We’d been talking about going there for ages, and we’d finally set a date and made it happen. The museum is nice, but it doesn’t have a lot of content. And a museum dedicated to Swedish history and culture that makes room to display—and I swear I am not making this up—furniture from Ikea probably should work a little harder to counterbalance such trifles with richer overall education and context. It does have a fun little area on the third floor, though, where kids can don the simple garments of rural 19th century Swedes and pretend to do backbreaking farm labor. So there’s that.
After the museum, Jamey and I spent an hour poking through the shops in Andersonville to find me a cool martini glass (more on that later), and then—on impulse—we headed to a spectacular little chamber concert at a local college. The guest performers were the Vermeer and Arianna String Quartets, who played works by Haydn, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn. Now, while the Haydn and the Mendelssohn pieces were positively transcendent—and played with such effortless virtuosity that they were almost orgasmic—the Shostakovich (Quartet #10, Op, 118) was a bit trying. He was one of those atonal Romantics, you see, and though the second movement of the #10 had that relentless urgency that can electrify even the most curmudgeonly among us, the final movement—with all its screeching and mewling and whimpering—Would. Not. End. But it’s Shostakovich’s 100th birth year, so we had to applaud politely. And there was a lovely snowfall blowing and whirling around the campus, so I spent the better part of all that noise contemplating its fluffiness through the windows.
And then it was time for the drinkin’! My friend Barb had invited me to a 40th birthday party Saturday night because she wanted me to meet all her cool gay friends. The party was martini-themed, and instead of real gifts, everyone was invited to bring a funky martini glass to drink out of for the night and then leave behind. (Mine was herringbone faux crystal with a manly stem, only $5 each at Pier 1, in case you wanted to re-create the magic at home.) There were huge pitchers of gasoline-powered cosmopolitans everywhere at the party, and my one glass of the stuff lasted me a good three hours. Then I politely switched to Coke (with wedges of lemon, because some occasions just call for fancy).
And the party was a blast! Many of Barb’s friends are professional artists, complete with galleries and installations and commissions and tenured positions and tons of interesting stories. The rest of her friends are just plain fun. And smart. It was exhausting just keeping up with some of the conversations. We even had a spirited roundtable discussion about the first sex scene in Brokeback Mountain, which I was surprised to discover elicited drastically different interpretations among different genders and sexual orientations. The gay men saw it as simple animal lust between two horny, possibly-in-love guys. The straight men saw it as two guys getting off any way they could in a desperate, lonely situation. The straight women saw it as rape. (Even when it was pointed out that Jack dropped his own drawers and hungrily backed his own ennis up to Ennis' jack before it was really established that the men’s fumbling would turn sexual, they still saw it as rape.) And the lesbians didn’t really weigh in; they were off building workbenches in the garage or something.
Five delightful hours later, the party started winding down and I headed home with a new Friendster connection and an admittedly very casual invitation to vacation in an Italian villa this summer with a group of very fun people. Which I’m still actually thinking about.
Sunday was putz-around-the-house day. I pulled all the furniture away from the walls and vacuumed up a sizeable herd of dust buffaloes. I filled two dust rags with unspeakable filth. I took a massive pile of old clothes and dog bowls and pots and pans and tacky holiday decorations to the Brown Elephant. I came home with a sturdy little table to display a ficus tree I got free from a neighbor in my building. (I’ve always thought a ficus tree covered with Christmas lights would look super cool branching up from behind the TV in the corner of my living room. I’ll find out tonight (once I pick up the tree) if I thought right—for only the cost of a $3 used table!) And I finished off the weekend
No comments:
Post a Comment