Mommy and Me: Date Night at the Art Museum

	Tenderheart Bear You are thinker, organizer, peacekeeper, and leader all in one. You have a power to command attention and people listen to you. However, you are often so concerned about not hurting others' feelings that you don't tell them what they need to hear and this gets you both into trouble. But you always have loyal friends to help you out.
Take the Which Care Bear Are You? Quiz!

The good news is, every link to every LJ quiz I appear to ever have taken is dead. 
Except this one.


Man, remember Livejournal? And blogging back when it was just thoughtsinks of people's days, fanfic, and quiz results? Me, too. I miss those. When I didn't feel like I was writing "for an audience" (or trying to), or like every post had to be vaguely "on message." When I just got today out of my brain and in to the pensieve, to make room for other shit. Sunday was good enough to make it feel like a good time to bring those back.

So.

My mom came to visit! She came out for my youngest cousin's 4th birthday party, up in Vail, then drove down to Boulder with me afterwards on Saturday. Long story short, I spent like 7 hours in a car yesterday, driving all over the mountains, then down to Denver for derby and the Nervous Curtains show. And then passed out at 1am and slept for 10 hours, counting the time change. For those of you keeping score, that is not only the most sleep I've gotten in a month, but also the first time in that same month that I've fallen asleep before the sun rose. And when I say rose, I mean was significantly in the sky. Insert commentary on the joys of insomnia and mental health disorder byproducts.

Anyway. I slept! Then headed to the Boulderado a little late, after scouring the internet for a good place to take her to dinner. My go-to, Root Down, was full up on reservations for the ENTIRE NITGHT, so I needed a plan B. Problem is, there is no plan B. Let's be honest, I don't eat at $30/plate restaurants very often (basically, unless my parents are in town), so I had a pretty small personal sample size to choose from. My friends on the intertubes had some pretty great suggestions, but they weren't quite what I was looking for. (And it seemed rude to go back and explain, a little bit more and more, after every suggestion, about my mom's personal tastes. But really, internet, your suggestions were what led me to the RIGHT place, so they really were sincerely appreciated.) It took me about 40 minutes to paw through everything the internet could teach me about every 3 star restaurant downtown (along the way, I got a refersher course in Things I Hate About Food Industry Websites - you're lucky I closed all the tabs, place that had an automatic audioplayer start up, otherwise I'd be calling you right the fuck out.) before I found what I was looking for.

My mom, to her credit, is pretty good at food. Better, at least, than the rest of my family, who could honestly live on McDonald's, teriyaki (fun fact: "teriyaki" is not in my computer's spellcheck, but "sukiyaki" is.) chicken, and pizza, if they so chose. And they often do. I broke out of that, after years of my own peanut butter and jelly, turkey hoagie, and pasta diet, when I went to college and realized that if I didn't start being adventurous, cafeteria food and ramen might actually kill me. So mom is up for SOME shenanigans, but not many. She's still a little squirmy about international foods, and anything too high concept - molecular gastronomy, weird portion sizes, etc - won't fly. At a base level, I personally object to any place that puts a $20 hamburger on the menu with a straight face, so there was a LOT of stuff downtown that got ruled out. Not to spoil the dinner recap portion of this entry, but we ended up at Beast and Bramble, which was a total home run.

I felt bad - I was running late and so engrossed in my restaurant research that I forgot to call and let Mom know, so she was standing outside the hotel for like 20 minutes. Rude. Do better next time, M'ris.

Drive down was sunny and uneventful. Mom made a last minute clutchtime decision to go to the Denver Art Museum instead of the Denver Botanic Gardens, so I pulled right at the split and headed thataways. (I wasn't too excited about the Botanic Gardens anyway, so I may have stacked the deck a little. Subtly.) I missed the turnoff for Speer, because Holy Fuck, that section of 25 has been under construction FOREVER, WHY CAN'T YOU GET MORE FUCKING SIGNAGE FOR THE SPEER EXIT, YOU GITS???

Parking, line, museum. Hooray for endless emails from endless Denver websites paying off, I remembered that Denver Arts Week is happening and saved $3 on admission. Sure, it's only $3, but hey. I like how every dollar saved via couponing feels like a tiny victory. Like the real life equivalent of finding items in a video game.

We had about 90 minutes before our timeslot for the audio tour of Passport to Paris, the rotating exhibit currently on display at DAM, which actually gave us just enough time to check out the adjoining sections. (There are 3 - Nature As Muse, a collection of Impressionst paintings, Drawing Room, an intimate room full of works-on-paper from the Esmond Bradley Martin Collection, and the main event, Court to Cafe, which features three centuries of masterworks. I totally cribbed most of that from the DAM website.)

I'd actually suggested the DAM exhibit without really looking in to it, and it wasn't til we actually got inside Nature As Muse that I remembered - Mom loves the Impressionists. They are, in fact, her favourite period, with Monet topping that list out by - well, as much as Root Down tops out my Denver Restaurant List. (Her second pick is Van Gogh, also applicable here, and then a very distant Georgia O'Keefe.)

The thing I always hate about crowded art museum isn't so much the crowding, or the other people standing around staring at the pictures, but the way I feel like I can feel all those other people's eyes boring in to my back when I move up to the picture to look at it in more detail, even thought they've all just done the exact same thing. Because, y'know, it's what you do. But I'm just a casual tourist, I'm definitely not a zillionaire art snob, so what right do I have to be taking up that time and space? I know, I know. That part is just in my head. Still. Makes me nervous, don't like it. The consequence of that is that I always feel rushed, and the consequence of THAT is that I always end up feeling like I've missed some ephemeral something.

They had one of Monet's Water Lilies paintings on display, along with several other works, plus some Pisarro, Renoir, and a lot of Sisley. Though I definitely had a moment where I really missed Dad, where the caption next to the Renoir went on and on about his masterful use of lines, dashes, exposed canvas, and squiggles. I then spent several minutes counting the squiggles.

In case you were wondering, there was one singular squiggle. A squig, if you would. In the river, in the lower left corner. Look for it, if you get the chance. It's pretty expressive. (It's a squiggle.)

I think the exhibit made Mom a little heartsick, because as we walked out, she told me how she remembered giving all of Grandma's art books away to one of the Hartford museums, after she died. Grandma would've really liked the exhibit, too.

Upstairs was the Drawing Room, which, while impressive in its own right, I wasn't super in to. Mostly I was getting hungry, trying to figure out if I should change the time of the reservation, and making What Does the Fox Say jokes in my head. See, like I said, Drawing Room is this collection of paper works, which is basically just sketchbook pages or simple pen/ink/watercolor drawings. (Not always, but usually.) The first display is some pages from a menu that Paul Gauguin did for a dinner party in Tahiti. They're actually some of my favourite pieces from the show, but they definitely involve a cartoon fox dancing around, and where else was my brain supposed to go with that.

By the time Mom was done in there, we were right on time for our timeslot for Court to Cafe. Which, sorry, I really don't have a lot to say about. It's a very well put together collection, a selection that shows the progress and evolution from pre-Louis XIV up through the impressionists, in a variety of media (including music and video), which is cool. But, ugh, I cannot stop being bored... bored is the wrong word. Fatigued, irritated, put out by - a lot of the Baroque oil paintings. I understand its place and relevance, historiologically, but man. Something about it just grates on me. Like, on a really fundamental level, the gloss of the paints and the finish of many of the works, makes me want to complain about it, a lot. Distaste for the subject matter, the focus on the ornate, lush lives of the nobility... blahhhh. Want to stab things. This collection did include a few more "subversive" (by which I mean "normal") works, (and I am a git b/c I forgot to write down names), but the guy who explicitly set out to paint normal people as snapshots from their normal lives, warts and all. The one they had on display was of a woman painted while she was suffering from some sort of head cold. Her hair is mussed, her nose is red, and she looks exhausted, not porcelain perfect and demure. That's the stuff I appreciate from that era. Oh, and the Rococo inlayed furniture. That shit's bonkers, yo.

I actually lost Mom in the exhibit - I didn't remember passing her, but when I turned in my headset, she wasn't outside the exhibit hall. So I snuck back in (literally, past one of the guards who was giving people a hard time for reentry), found her, and told her to text me when she was done. In the meantime, I wandered over to the Nick Cave exhibition (which is really just a video with some bad audio of some of the soundsuits in motion. Could've been really cool, but they'd clearly done it up as a kid's exhibit, not a for serious one), then headed up to the 3rd floor for some of their more modern art, which is much more my speed.

I was thrilled to walk in and find a whole exhibit full of Vance Kirkland's up (on loan from The Kirkland, obvs, which Mom had nixed because she's not really in to Modern/Pop/Bauhaus/Etc.) I really like Kirkland - he hits this note with me that's somewhere between Dali and Barbarella, or Ken Kelly (you know him by all the Manowar album covers.), and the stuff my dad used to paint when he was in college. Then I turned the corner and came face to face with an Barbara Kruger's It's Our Pleasure to Disgust, which, hi, I can't tell you how long I spent in undergrad dissecting her stuff (to a bunch of other comm majors who I'm sure were sick to death of me.)

Some requisite sunset shots from the Sculpture Deck, which I had completely to myself that afternoon, then up to the 4th floor to flop around in this womb/uvula/squishy bean bag floor/interactive art thing. Mom got a hold of me as I was done flopping, then humored me as a excitedly showed her a rug portrait that Chuck Close has spent 4 years learning how to create, and some sculptures made out of mylar tape. I may have also done a lot of cartwheels in Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza's interactive a/v exhibit, Transposition. Mom never openly approves of such shennanigans, but I always catch her smiling at me when she thinks I'm not looking. She secretly loves it.

We got out of there right at closing time, and I stalled on the street for a minute while I called Beast and Bramble to change our 6.30 reservation to 5.30. Mom was getting a little hungry-cranky and I - well, in typical fashion, I hadn't actually eaten all day. I detoured us around the Convention Center/Performing Arts Complex, to show Mom the giant blue bear, then headed over to food.

Sometimes Mom is really easy to make happy, when sightseeing - all she really wants to see is "old buildings," quote unquote. I tried to explain to her that Denver isn't really old, so there isn't a whole lot of that around, but she was actually pretty thrilled with the Franklin & Studebaker building, and the Jonas Bros Furs sign.

Beast and Bramble, to lead with the punchline (again) was a total hit. They were super amenable to us changing the reservation (even though, I know, earlier is always easier. And it was almost empty in there when we got there at 5.25), happy to switch us to a different table with better lighting, etc. Our server knew the menu really well, and was happy to offer any and all advice to Mom, who isn't really familiar with the whole "farm to table" thing.

And the food. Oh, man. If I were a food blogger of any capacity at all, I'd stop right now and let this be its own glorious, indulgent entry. But I'm not, so really, what you get is a whole bunch of "holy shit this was so good," which I will probably just copypasta to Yelp anyway.

We skipped the Chef's Course or whatever it was called (1 app & 1 entree of your choosing, plus an intermezzo course of the chef's choosing/creation), though the horseradish braised beef something something sounded pretty awesome. I'd already kind of drooled over some stuff on the main menu, so Mom just said I should order as many apps as I wanted, and we'd share. Fun fact: my mother is a filthy liar.

We put in for their pumpkin flan, some roasted parsnips, and a lamb cheeks with gnocci thing. While it was all wonderful (the pumpkin flan was like eating a pumpkin flavored cloud,) the lamb. Holy crap, the lamb. Again: not a food blogger, so I can't actually describe a damn thing - but here's this instead:

There is a very short list of dishes that I would (and have) thrown caution and/or dignity to the wind for, and literally licked the plate. There was a garlic butter escargot in Ghent, Belgium that I actually picked up and drank the snail-butter-garlic sauce out of the pockets of the snail-plate. There was a lamb at Dish, in Edwards, CO, that I actually picked up and licked. Christophe has photos. And there were the lamb cheeks at Beast and Bramble, where I sheepishly asked for a spoon when the waitress came to clear our plates, so I could drink the au jus at the bottom of the dish in a manner that wouldn't make me look like a total three year old. I don't know what was in there. Mushrooms and lamb and gnocchi and salt and pixie dust, or something. It could have been a meal unto itself, and I would have been happy.

Oh, and the part I didn't mention: Mom didn't share, so much as she made me eat both the parsnips and the lamb on my own, then guilted me in to finishing her flan. Because mothers.

Obviously, by the time the main course came, I was too full to eat my quail. Quail! I love quail. It was good, and is half sitting in my fridge right now (half of the dish. It is not half in, half out of my refridgerator.), while Mom finished all of her mint fettucini with chicken liver. I love some really weird stuff  - Ankimo (Monkfish liver) is actually one of my favourite foods - but man, I cannot get behind chicken liver. I always think I can, and then as just as soon as I'm about to make my peace with it, bam, there is is, that awful coppery aftertaste that makes me want to gargle with saltwater forever.

Not to be forgotten in all of this lamb jus drinking awesomeness, is the fact that Mom and I had really good dinner conversation, too:

Mom: I wonder if there's a way to tell paint apart, like from the composition of it.
Me: Of couse there is. It's pretty easy, really. That's a really common way of dating paintings, actually - a spectranalysis of the chemicals in the paint.
Mom: Really? Like what?
Me: Like lead. Lead makes some really vibrant colors. That's why you don't lick the Van Goghs.

Mom: Oh, this {her clutch}? I got it in Venice {where she just was with my dad in the spring}. Just feel how soft it is!
Me: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's pretty nic - WHOA. Mom, this zipper is SO SMOOTH! {I proceed to zip and unzip the zipper on the clutch about 20 times, because seriously, it was a really smooth moving zipper. No resistance at all. Just glide. STOP JUDGING ME.}
Mom: Marissa! Stop playing with my zipper!

We debated over dessert a little too long while I simultaneously looked up movie times, eventually ordering a marscapone mousse that I was expecting, for some reason, to be kind of mediocre and uninteresting (why, M'ris? Everything else you had tonite has been amazing! Why would dessert be any different??), but turned out to be, obviously, awesome. I forgot to ask if they sell their rooftop honey, but man, I hope they do.

Dessert somehow took 40 minutes, and by the time we got out of there, we were running late to the movie at The Pavilions. Per usual, I got lost on my way to 16th street from Broadway, because that deke on to Tremont makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Luckily, there were about a thousand previews, so even though we kind of got lost in the theatre (and almost had a fight, thank god that was narrowly avoided), we made it to Last Vegas in plenty of time.

I'd actually wanted to take Mom to the Sie FilmCenter - she became a member of the local arthouse theatre back home a few years ago, and has really been enjoying the classes there. (My mom now loves Fellini! She saw 8 1/2! Twice!) But the only thing playing there that I thought she might be interested in was 12 Years a Slave, which I suggested, but thought might be a little heavy for the night. Then Last Vegas came up, and when I suggested it, she totally lit up. I should've known, it's all her favourite actors, in a comedy that Dad would despise seeing with her. (And, secretly, I have kind of really wanted to see it ever since I saw the trailer. Does that make me old?)

Last Vegas may only have gotten 2 stars most places, but guys, it's super cute. It really is The Hangover for Old Dudes, only without the gratuitous sex and uncomfortable jokes that made The Hangover just a little too much for me. Last Vegas, on the other hand, is actually really respectful of its subject matter (womanizing, fidelity, and eldering), while still managing to be hilariously on point. Old people jokes are so easy to turn in to cheap, meaningless laughs, but Kline and DeNiro are just all over them. Perfect delivery.

There's also this douchey dudebro that they turn into their servant boy and help reform his dudebro ways, and it's so minor to the plot, but it is SO AMAZING to see a plausible, accessible, mass media example of "Hey, jerkwad. You're being a jerkwad. Stop being a jerkwad. Here is a primer on how not to be a jerkwad, by which we mean how to treat women like they're people."

After the movie let out, Mom bought a $6 bottle of water from the concession stand. Nevermind that I have like 18 bottles of water in my car (that she's been bugging me to throw out since Saturday), nevermind that there's a 7-11 around the corner, as I tried to inform her. $6 bottle of concession stand water. Purchased.

We got back to the car, where I was disappointed to learn that $6 bottled water does not taste like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous:

Mom: Do you want some?
Me: Sure. Y'know, I hope this tastes like gilded lilies. Like saffron and rubies had a child, and it's this bottle of water. {drinks}
Mom: So?
Me: We're talking topaz, tops.
Mom: Better than quartz.

Finally, we headed off to 7C, so I could drop off a cliplamp as a stopgap til we can get one of the overhead lights replaced. I was kind of apprehensive about taking mom to 7C, and told her so - as much as I love that place, it's, well, ugly. Dirty. Disgusting. It's not the kind of place that Mom would feel comfortable in, at all. And so while there was a part of me that really wanted her to see this place that I'm so passionate about, I knew that even if she saw it, she still wouldn't really get it. And in fact, would probably actively dislike it. Which would invariably lead to a fight that I really just never want to have. (I left that part out.)

As I opened the door of my car, she elected to stay in there and wait for me. "Lock the doors," she called out behind me. "Don't forget about me!" she yelled as I shut the door behind me.

There's probably a whole other entry about how, even at 30, I still want my mom to approve of my life and the things I do and care about, and how disappointed I can be when I know that she won't grok something the way that I do. And to that end, honestly, it was probably better that she stayed in the car. Still, I wish she could see what I see in places and spaces like 7C, and how important what we're doing there is for all the communities that intersect around it - Denver, touring musicians, teenagers, etc etc etc. Like I said. Another time.

Then blah blah lamp delivered, Jorden hugged and kvetched at, new kid vaguely scared of me, mission accomplished all around. This is also just about the point in a Livejournal entry where I would start getting tired of writing all this verbose nonsense, and sum the rest of the evening up in like three lines. Ready?

Drive up was uneventful as I continued to hate-listen to the audiobook of James Dashner's The Kill Order. It's really fucking terrible. A lengthy explanation of my love of hate-listening to audiobooks is probably also best left to another post.. Dropped Mom off, swung around, headed to Dark Horse to meet up with the guys and their M:tG decks, then peaced out around 12.45 and came home. It's now 3am, and I've been writing this 4000 (3700, if we're being picky) word blog post for two hours. I suppose this should be the part where I sleep, now.

Requisite Denver sunset photo, sculpture deck of the Denver Art Museum