Arting It Up in San Francisco

Your mom and I hopped back into San Francisco for the day to get some culture, starting with a long anticipated viewing of a classic Dutch painting which your mom has always been a big fan of, Girl With a Pearl Earring, by Vermeer. Then, it was off to the theater to see her cousin Jenny perform in a stage adaption of Dirty Dancing. Oh yes, we are quite artful and classy, it would seem.

Of course we started the day by checking out one of the swanky San Francisco brew pubs, Social Kitchen. I really like to show up early like this before anyone else gets there. Makes for a bit more room, a bit more quiet, and sometimes I can provoke the servers into chatting with me a bit about the beers. 

Then we headed into Golden Gate Park, the home of the de Young Museum where the painting was being shown as well as many other neat places we had no idea were tucked away in there, including some botanical gardens and a huge science museum which is now on our "to do" list. 

The park is enormous and inside are multiple museums and other attractions. This is the science museum which is right across the way from the art museum, which was right behind me when I took this picture. 

We had some time to kill, so we enjoyed a drink in the de Young Cafe and waited for Jenny to meet up with us. 

The museum was packed with art appreciators, all enticed by the opportunity (perhaps once in a lifetime) to see this Dutch masterpiece up close and personal. I'd never been in such a crowd of people lining up to see a painting, and it was an exciting energy to be a part of. 

Photography was prohibited, though your mom got a sneaky camera-phone shot at one point. It was a moving experience, to see all these 21st century people hovering around a canvas in front of which a man in 1665 painted a mysterious image of a woman. Your mom was moved to tears and enjoyed every second in front of this piece of history. We also got to see quite a few engravings by Rembrandt!  

Your mom and her cousin Jenny have recently found one another and made a point to reconnect after all these years after growing up together in Oklahoma.  

Since the theater where Jenny would be performing later was in the Mission District, we had some dinner at Taqueria Cancun, a tiny, crowded little Mexican joint nearby, where the burritos were big enough to make two meals apiece.  

We moseyed around Valencia Street and stumbled into the only "pirate-themed" gift shop in the world, actually the front of a fund-raising venture by a non-profit organization which operated an after school program during the week. It was quite amusing and even more heartening because it was for a noble cause. It was full of snarky little signs like this hocking their pirate-themed wares to people who probably didn't need them (i.e. eye patches, lard "by the bootful," and hooks for hands). 

Jenny left us to begin rehearsal before the show, and we made our way down the block to this used book store, where your mom found some more additions to her collection. Every book in her collection is associated with some trip we took together, making her bookshelf more like an album of memories than simply a shelf of literature.  

This tiny bar-turned-theater is on Mission Street, the heart of one of the trendier spots in San Francisco, and tonight it was the home of Dirty Dancing: Live on Stage, the brainchild of Jenny's friend, Lauren.  

It was closing night and the place was sold out!

Jenny played the part of "Baby's" mom, a pill-popping lush who seemed to approach the dilemma of her daughter, the main character, with a "who cares where's my drink" attitude. She was hilarious!

And while the cast and crew partied it up the rest of the night, we hit the road back home, enticed by calling it a day and laying down to greet whatever else would come with this full weekend.