Episode 5--Hangin' with the Artrats in Hampden

Now of course it will soon be Valentine's Day and for many people this means exchanging with their beloveds a lot of sweet and gooey and quite frankly crassly commercial things, all in the name of romance and that unassailable brand of American consumerism of which we're all so fond.

But I live in Baltimore now and these days run with an "artsier" crowd, and so going to a "love/ relationship-themed" art reception like the one I went to this past Saturday at the Art Under Ground studio in Hampden was a bit more my speed. The reception promoted a new exhibit there called "Friends with Benefits, or How 143 Means I Love You."

My friend Renee Tantillo, whose art in the "If It's Yellow" exhibit at the Load of Fun Studio I never did get over to see (see Episode 3, "Sweatin' Over My Choices at The Charles"), had invited me and was showing some pieces. You can see one in this episode's photo, it is the "thorny" metal heart which Renee has titled "Miss You/ Love Hurts/ Fetish 1."

Another metal heart Renee created is called "Gearheart," it has been sodered as if re-sewn clumsily after breaking, and features also an exposed place through which its insides are gaping through.

Now admittedly I've never been all that "crafty" at the art of love really. If pressed to describe my 'romantic skills,' I suppose I could cite my wonderful ability to botch things up always in fresh, creative and interesting ways; or to 'artfully' squander perhaps the most potentially promising romantic opportunities. So it should come as no surprise that I've surely had my share of fun heartbreak opportunities as Renee's work expresses (indeed who has not, really?), and greatly look forward to many more exciting ones in the future. Though at the moment I am (thankfully) feeling generally quite mellow and happy, and more than content to re-live such "thorny" feelings mostly in the past tense.

Actually I spent a good part of my uniquely 'artsy Hampdenish pre-Valentine's' Sat night in the quite tranquil and really pleasurable company of not just Renee and my good friend Kirsten, but also my physicist-cum-artist friend Ramesh and a number of his and Renee's art-world friends.

After the reception Ramesh and friends Matt (an artist), Robin (a poet) and Gavin (an artist and playwright) and I strolled along Chestnut Ave. heading for something to eat. During this stroll, Matt mentioned coming across John Waters in Hampden just the week before. For many Baltimoreans the mere mention of 'Hampden' quite logically conjures up thoughts of John Waters anyway, it was after all the neighborhood in which he lived for many years and which he loved to film.

But Ramesh and I have both gotten pretty deep in the 'quirky artsy eccentric world' of Bmore in a relatively short space of time and have formed certain associations of our own. And so as Ramesh and I hung out and snacked on tofu burgers and fried pickles at Rocket to Venus we talked and speculated not so much about John Waters but our friend Woody Lissauer.

Woody is this really wonderfully talented and gifted songwriter/ musician who lives in Hampden and has for several years now and who in fact composed and performs a rather quirky song about his 'hood called 'Hampden in the Rain.' In this song Woody details some of Hampden's less desirable qualities, including the 'streetrats' that come out after barflies and partiers and 'artrats' (my word, not Woody's) have left and gone home, often leaving lots of nice trash and detritus behind in their wake. (YouTube video of Woody's 'Hampden' is viewable a bit lower down on the right side of this Blog or by clicking here.)

Really my friends and I find Woody to be every bit as unique, colorful and startlingly extraordinary as any of the characters John Waters created or at least 'projected' in his films, and also as Hampden or John Waters or for that matter Baltimore itself. So it has become a great pastime of ours after our latest 'Woody-encounter' to get together and recount the always-memorable, and quite frequently wholly unexpected, things that Woody has lately done and said.

So of course Ramesh and I spoke about Woody for some time, and also about my New Year's Day party where for Ramesh he last appeared, and at which certain other very strange and mostly inexplicable things happened too. Then we moved on to other subjects and I got very tired suddenly, and asked Ramesh if he could drop me home before taking his friends out on the next leg of their 'art-show-hopping' escapades.

On the way to Ramesh's car, I stopped in the street for a moment, lost in my thoughts and the pulsing red glow of a rather 'typical-for-Hampden' Christmas-style Valentine's electric-light display of a house across the way. To me it seemed that the light was symbolic, warning but also beckoning of many more inexplicable, eccentric, but always uniquely 'Bawlmorean' adventures to come.

Woody will perform live w/ full band along w/ a number of other great local Bmore & Maryland bands at a Static Chain concert at Sonar, 401 E. Saratoga St., on Fri, Feb 22nd (tix $12, doors open 7:30 pm, concert at 8). He also performs regularly wkends at Harvest Table, & at various venues in MD & beyond throughout the year. For more on Woody's music, concerts & videos see http://www.woodylissauer.com/ .

Matt's art and Robin's poetry will both be featured in a show called Sensarium to be held Sat Feb 23rd from 8 pm- 1 am at the Whole Gallery at 405 W. Franklin Street (3rd Floor). The cost is $7 but only $5 if you bring art materials for the collaborative project on the agenda, or if you wear red. More details are at http://MayhemOnward.com/RED.

I understand that Gavin also has an upcoming play through Theatre Project, but I don't have details on that yet. I have learned however that Cosmic Cocktail tix (the upcoming March 6th City Paper-sponsored party at The Belvedere) are now available for purchase, you can get them in person at The 8 x 10 Club and also online through Mission Tix here.

The final "shameless plug" I will give is for an upcoming party (open to the public) to be hosted by Smalltimore Events on behalf of Maryland Lawyers for the Arts on Thursday, February 21st, between 6-9 pm. The MLA is really a terrific nonprofit organization which helps income-eligible artists and art organizations with legal issues, and it is celebrating the launch of its new "MLA Arts Brief" publication. The party is free ($10 donation suggested for non-VIPs), it is being sponsored by two great chic restaurants (Tsunami and Lemongrass), and all for a really great cause.

Also there is space in one room for local artists to exhibit their work for the party. If you are interested in going please RSVP to smalltimoreevents@gmail.com, and also please contact this same address if you an artist interested in exhibiting opportunities for the event.

Copyright 2008 by Lois

Episode 1--The Man-Eating Plant*

So, here is how I became apprised of this rather peculiar...situation concerning my ficus.

I was chatting at an office party recently with Tom, an attorney about as attractive and charismatic as he is funny (and no Mom he is not single, he is quite happily married with two lovely children thank you very much for asking.) --Sorry for the aside, but given Mom’s perpetual penchant for hopeful fantasizing along these lines I just knew what was coming.

In the course of our chat I mentioned that I would be taking off a week to attend to some things back home that needed...well, attending to.

Tom, catching ahold of some admitted deliberate ambiguity, ventured that perhaps the thing I meant chiefly to do at home was to take care of a certain ‘Man-Eating Plant' I had there. Such herbiage, he mused, could easily require a week’s full attention.

Now, normally I would have laughed at a comment clearly meant to be funny. In this case, I experienced a rather different reaction--at first surprise, then something else--instant recognition. As ridiculous as it sounds, you see--while I do not actually have a plant back home capable of that kind of cannibalistic behavior, I actually do have a rather large, and lately strangely thriving ficus.

I say strangely, because while I help to run and administer a blogsite called GreenCityBaltimore (http://greencitybaltimore.org/ ), I admit to being quite shockingly (and fatally) unskilled horticulturally-speaking. In fact, almost every plant that has been gifted to me by friends and/or guest-acquaintances (I do not undertake such plant-tending ventures on my own) has sadly found its way, at some inevitable time, down the ‘throw-away’ chute of my building.

On the other hand, the ficus (technically a tree, not a plant, if you note the wikipedia definition supplied here) bequeathed on me as an optimistic housewarming gift by my real estate agent, Betsy, really has proven quite unusually hardy.

Of late, though, I had sort of noticed that it (the ficus I mean) had developed a particularly jaunty sort of way of wearing its...hat.

"Wait--hat?" You might say. As well you should. "Since when does a ficus wear a hat?"

...Well, to this I will answer that it is a sort of blue Polo cap and if there was anything rather unusual about a ficus wearing one the thought had never before occurred to me. I tend as a whole to be about as indifferent and oblivious to such matters as I am about housekeeping and also about the strange eccentric but generally pretty charismatically attractive single men who sometimes, over the course of two years, have made very very brief 'guest' appearances in my life and my apartment and then disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.

Quite frankly, I have rarely had much time to concern myself at all with it, I have been so very busy with social activities and community work and running the GreenCityBaltimore blogsite and such things as that.

After Tom’s comment though, I could not help but connect the two phenomena. It occurred to me, at that moment, that I had perhaps seen that cap on someone else some months back before I first noticed it perched on the ‘head’ of my ficus.

Come to think of it, a rather specific someone...and not only did I never hear from him again after his initial apartment-visit, I don’t quite remember him ever leaving my apartment.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that perhaps I had, at last, struck upon a theory which was–well, if not exactly comforting, still rather satisfying at least in its ability to explain a few things. At least, if true, I could finally answer those pesky questions sometimes posed to me–by my Mom, by a few friends/ acquaintances along the way–about why I do not ever seem to have, or keep, any visible men in my life–although I personally know that they do sometimes find their way into my apartment.

The plant! Of course, the plant! It is the fault of that foolish, blood-thirsty, man-eating plant! Well, ficus, tree, plant, what’s the difference? The point is, I finally had an acceptable explanation!

Being hopelessly civic-minded, I figured I had no choice but to file a report with the proper authorities. They came, looked around a bit–doubtfully, really–swiped the hat and took DNA samples. (They did me the favor of loaning it back to me briefly so my ficus could model it once again for my Blogshow–see the second main photo on the right column of my Blog, in which the ficus can be spotted, if you look carefully, actually grinning.) The results are pending.

I am somewhat hopeful, perhaps more than I ought to be. With a crime problem as big as Baltimore’s (a city I love and so am sorry to have to admit to this), the reported disappearance of a few strange, eccentric, attractive single men from a single gal’s apartment is bound to rank a little low in their priorities.

Still, at least the report has now been made and the wheels of justice are turning, and moreover I now know enough to keep any men who might find their way in from here on out far away from the herbiage, and to watch both their entry and their exit more carefully.

Live and learn, isn't that way they say? ...Well, not so much for a few of my 'male guests' in the past tense perhaps, but in the end, really at this moment (at least until the test results are in) only my ficus knows the truth of it. I will of course apprise readers of any further 'green-crime' domestic developments. Crime of any sort, even of the potentially plant-committed variety, is simply not something to be taken lightly.

Until then, I will continue to tend, as best I can, to my ficus. Men are men, after all--they come and they go--but with 'green' things I figure I have at least an obligation to try as best I can, for once, to help things that were flourishing continue to flourish.

Copyright 2008 by Lois

*Some elements of this particular LL Sitcom may have been, and probably were, fictionalized. The ficus is real, although it now favors modeling ladies' shoes over men's caps. For more on this (even more alarming development) see my second comment below.