I've been busy IV

I'm still trying to get caught up with blogging my activities since my vacation. Part 4:

5/30: I went on a guided tour of the Girodet: Romantic Rebel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had opened a few days earlier. French painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson bridged the gap between the Neo-Classic style of his teacher Jacques-Louis David and the Romantic movement that followed. This is the first retrospective in America of the relatively little-known artist. I had never heard of him.

The tour was a special after-hours one organized by a French organization my wife is active in. Our group had the exhibition to ourselves (and a few museum guards to watch us). There were actually two tours, one in French, and one in English (thank goodness--I can understand French moderately well, but I would still miss a lot on a tour like this). Unfortunately, while I could understand her, our tour guide seemed ill-prepared. She indicated she knew almost nothing of Girodet before this exhibition. Furthermore, she seemed not to have rehearsed her talk at all--she continually forgot portions, and had to rely on reading from a text she had prepared.

Girodet certainly had tremendous technical skills. Even his earliest works showed this. But he quickly started painting wild historical and mythological scenes--though he had no trouble going to a conventional style to do portraits. There aren't a huge number of paintings in the exhibition--at least two of his most famous ones are too large to fit on a plane. There are more drawings than oils. Because this was a guided tour, I didn't get a chance to linger and examine some of the pictures as I would have liked to. If I get a chance I'll go back.

5/31: Started with the regular Wednesday Open House of Crossdressers International (CDI). Afterwards three of us went down to the Village to the Monster Bar for Jesse Volt's Follies. This week she had a good old fashioned drag show, with "the antics of" (as Jesse always introduces her) ShaBoomBoom, and Trai LaTrash. No "Ass is Tight" audience participation bit--which I always find boring. She even brought me up to the stage to show off what I was wearing--which was just a pair of black and white floral print capri pants and a U-neck t-shirt. She skipped telling the audience about my CDI connection, which she used to do. I think the new owner doesn't like her to mention that. After the show I had a nice chat with Trai.

6/1: The Stonewall Democratic Club of NYC 20th Anniversary Celebration: This years marks the 20th anniversary of both this club and that of the passage of the NYC Gay Rights Law. The two were celebrated at a fundrasiser/celebration at the lovely Via Restaurant on West 21st St. I went down there with Clover Honey, who is also in the Stonwall Dems--though a bit more active than I.

The big attraction of the evening was the presence of several of the city council members who voted for the Gay Rights Law, and Mayor Ed Koch, who supported it and signed it into law. The restaurant was pretty crowded, but I managed to get a good vantage point for the presentations of the certificates marking the occasion. Some were a bit long-winded, both on the presenters' end and the recipients'--but a few contained quite interesting recollections. One of the former council members was someone I worked for briefly in the mid-70s, before he was elected. I got a chance to come out as a trans-person to him. I'm not sure he really remembered me, but he seemed quite comfortable with my presentation as a woman.

After the presentations the crowd thinned out a bit. The yummy mini-pizzas and chicken and beef skewers came out rapidly, and made a nice meal. I got a chance to have a nice converstion with Tom Hickey, the former chair of my New York County Lawyers Assn LGBT Issues Committee, and still the director of the Name Change Project of the West Village TransLegal Clinic, where I'm a volunteer lawyer.

Afterwards I went down to the Lips Restaurant for a nightcap. Jesse Volt was doing her last show of the evening. I got a chance to thank her for bringing me up on stage at the Monster the previous night.

6/2: We were supposed to go to a cocktail party, but it was being held on an outdoor terrace so they cancelled it because of the rain. I was not very disappointed--it had been a long week.