Friend Becky and I went to an awesome event on Friday night. I thought about taking my camera, and in retrospect I wish I had. In lieu of pictures of the event itself, I played with Text mode and the program for the event: Passport to the Arts.
(If you are at all interested in art and food and drink, I recommend checking to see if there is an event like this near your town.)
Anyway, four venues in Clemson joined together to offer an evening of alcohol, finger foods, and visual and performing arts. The local arts center, the bus transit office, the art department at the university, and a local restaurant each offered live music and visual arts, along with one free drink of beer or wine, and finger foods. Each venue could be reached via four continually circulating CAT buses, on which there was also live entertainment (two different sets of barbershop quartets and one spoken word poet). One bus had no performance.
We started at the arts center and that was the best. We saw the Clemson African American Museum and an exhibit by the local artists guild, which included photography, quilting, sculpture, and paintings. The live act there was an adorable vocalist singing soft rock and pop songs with a bass and guitar backup. The center also had two "circus artists" (a juggler and a hula-hooper) from a circus arts collective in Greenville. The hula-Hooper was blase, but the juggler was very enthusiastic, slightly nervous, super-geeky, and only marginally skilled. They were both very young. The food here was my favorite. They had barbeque, rolls, coleslaw, cucumber sandwiches, spring rolls with greens in them (not great), and cream puffs with chocolate or raspberry sauce.
We enjoyed four members of the Upstate Chorus singing barbershop favorites while riding to the art department on campus. Here there was a string quartet and fruit trays. Most of the art was a little pretentious, as you would expect, but it had one good work, which was a giant (12 foot by 5 foot by 3 foot) wooden structure with a small (1 foot by 1 foot) garden in it with which you could make your own mint tea bag. Instructions, empty tea bags, tea, and needle and thread were provided. I called mine Lee Tea in honor of the venue.
Our next bus ride featured the (pregnant) spoken word poet, who was as young as the barbershop members were old. She was super-earnest while performing and effusive when she wasn't. Her poetry was mostly about urging generations to rise up and deal with the economic and environmental crises of the planet. There were two images she used that made me laugh, but now I can't remember what they were; something like "using the needle of passion and the thread of commitment to heal the earth." I do remember that she said "fill" for "feel" a couple times when she was telling me what I should think and fill (feel).
This stop was the CAT bus transit center. It opened in November 2011 and it is a really nice facility. There is a garage with space for about 20 buses. The main artwork was the worst one of the night: two flat screen TV's that showed computer-generated eyes that followed you around the room via a live camera feed. Blech.It was very trite, but it would have been marginally more interesting if the animation had not been so crappy. If it had been done with footage of a real person's eyes, it would have been so much better. However, there was an animated film of a Japanese boatman catching a fish that had lovely accompanying music that I liked. There were also some lovely handmade books made from recycled material, but my enthusiasm for them was dampened by their overoptimistic prices. The live music was provided by an oboe-clarinet duo. Food was store-bought cheesecake. Petit fours were bad, but the cheesecake I had was delicious.
Our next ride, which included a pass through the bus garage (awesome) was to the nearby Red Minnow restaurant. Sculpture and pottery were on display there. Nothing fancy, but nice to look at. The food was both the best and worst. There was only one small thing that was left by the time we got there, shrimp and grits, which was super rich and tasty. However, there were no plates and only knives as utensils. I was disappointed that the venue hosts were not as interested in following through. I was very sad for Becky because this was the grub to which she was most looking forward. Live music was just whatever they were having in the bar downstairs anyway, typical bar-grill local rock band.
We took the bus back to the arts center, where we parked, and filled up on barbeque, which was still plentiful, and listened to the girl with the golden voice. We wept some mother-tears for the little heartbreaking vignette we witnessed at the close of the evening. In which beautiful singer thanks contract player bassist, barely remembering his name. We think he was in love with her. Becky and I were in love with them both, but of course we had both had four free drinks by then, so we were in love with everyone!
It was the best event I'd been to in a long time, and I'll definitely try to go again next year. This was the second or third year they had it, and it wasn't a fundraiser, just a chance for some "like-minded individuals" to provide art and culture for the community.
Can you tell how much I loved it?!
It was blast, but my body is still recovering. The run is a 3.5 mile
obstacle course given on a Marine training base. The obstacles included
several 6-foot walls, an eight-foot wall, a 12-foot wall, a rope swing,
mud pits that we had to crawl through, a balance beam, a 20-foot tall
cargo net, a rope climbing wall, and a couple of other things you had to
climb over or through. 36 obstacles total I think. It was so much fun,
but I was very slow in the running bits between obstacles.
