Junior High Art for Remedial Adults

So there I was in my fancy suede booties, tweed babydoll dress and Michael Kors bag, pretty sure that the event I just walked into was NOT an art show.

I'll clarify. Having many friends in the art and music community, Hubs and I avidly attend art shows, gallery openings, CD release parties, weenie roasts, even jam sessions-- really any excuse for a gathering and a promise of good company (and purple drank!) will get us there. Sometimes we'll even be in a refined and elegant mood and go to the symphony, although I prefer the opera since someone almost invariably dies in some fantastically gruesome way. We love to go out and our social schedule lacks for nothing, let me tell you. And so we had just finished an excellent dinner and polished off two bottles of wine with another couple when I suggested going to a Halloween-themed art show at this new bar/lounge I'd heard of downtown. With apologies our friends demurred, citing an agreement with their babysitter to be back around 9:30. And I am SO GLAD they did, because when Hubs and I arrived at the establishment, I was spared some significant embarrassment.

My first clue really should have been the location in a neighborhood long known to harbor leathery and half-hearted tranny prostitutes in its shadowy corners. Since I am a person who thinks in landmarks rather than street numbers, I of course envisioned a neighborhood 13 blocks away. Still, we parked, dodged a homeless man coming at a dead run towards us with his shopping cart, and quickly entered the bar. Which brings me back to the very first line of this post.

• We were in a tiny, one-room dive bar with twenty-foot ceilings, cram-packed to the gills with art. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, except what I mean is that the art was hung one piece after another, all different sizes, all the way up to those twenty-foot ceilings. We couldn't even see half of it, not only for the manner of hanging, but also because the lights were dim and situated in the tall corners of the room. 

• There were roughly 15 people dressed in costumes ranging from the cast of Jersey Shore to SpongeBob to a FREE MAMOGRAM BOOTH! (sic) to a Playboy Bunny, each shrieking at varying decibels to reflect their level of drunk. That was 159 people fewer than had RSVPed in the affirmative on the Facebook invite. It looked liked we had at least ten years on all of them too, and it's not because we look old.

• And possibly worst of all, there was a band, a sad, sad, little band, consisting of a keyboardist and a guitarist/singer. The keys player kept hitting foul notes, and the guitarist's distortion was cranked to such a phat degree that we couldn't hear notes-- all we hear was fuzz. The singer warbled, and not in a crooning or even endearing way, but a way that suggested he had never sung before, much less in front of an audience, and the keyboardist frequently yanked a hand away to hold a sheet of lyrics in front of the squinting singer's face. And they were trying to cover Thriller. Fail. FAIL.

Nevertheless, we soldiered on towards the bar, where I put down my card and asked for two gin and tonics (of course). The bartender dressed as Pauly D brought me two of the strongest drinks I've ever had, neither of which had a lime. But, I'll admit I kind of thought they were awesome at $3 each. Perhaps we'll dress down and go back there for strong, cheap drinks...

By far the most painful part for Hubs was the band, which kept trying to cover the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana *heart attack* and then somehow segued into Journey. Warbling, fuzzing, foul-note-hitting. Hubs was very closing to grabbing a guitar and schooling those young rapscallions in the ways of proper rocking out, and even asked if I'd be willing to sing if he made a move...but I just couldn't. I couldn't let him humiliate them when they were doing a fine job of it on their own. I wish I'd had the foresight to take some video of this mess before we left, but it wasn't until we were talking about the "art show" in the car that I realized this should probably be a blog post.

We did manage to wander the confines of the postage-stamp sized bar and look at maybe five pieces of art, for which we had come so far and endured so much. And they were terrible. Remember how you drew when you were in junior high? Uneven, blobby unicorns and stick figure women with inexplicable boobs and too-full lips? No? Just me? Okay. Well, it was like that. It was, as you may have gathered, like junior high art class for remedial adults, the fruits of which were splattered all over the unpainted, splintery walls of a musty room that had somehow procured a liquor license for teens. This was the best piece of art there (actually kind of cool), and it was situated directly behind the mumbling singer where it was impossible to get a closer look:

The Art Show. It was very anti-climactic.