As I always say, there are two rules to Lawrence: 1) Don’t leave; and 2) If you leave, come back. The last 24 hours echoed the value of those rules, starting and ending with the pistachio.
It began for me at 5:30 p.m. at Limestone Pizza, one of the best, where-have-you-been-all-my-life new restaurants in town. Waiting for a table, the generous Anne Patterson, finishing her dessert nearby, offered me a spoonful of pistachio gelato. How good is life and how true is pure pleasure? Very! Dinner included dear and old friends, husband and grown child; the cure-all-ails Kansas-style pizza (thanks to a big limestone oven named, for our sweet and departed friend, Maggie); astonishing salad with
micro-whatevers; slivered of fried zucchini; and dessert: I have just discovered something called a budino, a thick Italian custard obviously created to end wars.
Then it was off to the blurred joys of Final Fridays (our monthly arts extravaganza) and the Free State Arts Festival. One gallery featured cut-up old books, the pages folded and fanned to evoke spinning tops. Just outside, a bunch of high school kids playing wicked wood guitar. The Phoenix gallery included one of our town’s musical gems: Darrell Lea, and a bunch of us belting out “Strawberry Fields Forever” as we perused crayons shaped like features. More walking, and we found ourselves sipping Free State beer, chatting with friends or strangers, and wandering into an East Lawrence lawn concert before crossing small parking lots
or pocket parks loaded with singing and listening. We went into Cider Gallery, where I was dazzled by Stan Herd’s paintings, and Ken by Clare Doveton’s, before an attack fly drove us outside again.
Exhausted, we collapsed into a small red couch at Marty Olson’s Do’s Deluxe, which sported a tattoo show. The Argentinean tattoo artist, Martin del Camino, inspired by traditional and contemporary Japanese designs (lots of spiraling ocean waves) was kind enough to give us a world tour of his arms and legs, featuring tattoos from famous and upcoming artists from his travels (he even tattooed part of his calf himself).
Rejuvenated, we stepped outside to find Nicholas Ward’s inspired short film
about East Lawrence, threaded with the music of Ardys Ramberg and other locals, being projected on the side of a building while a small crowd filled folding chairs. It turns out most of the crowd was also i the film, so we had occasion to meet and greet the stars.
Across the street to the east, we were beckoned to the St. Luke’s AME Church by friends who said there was about to be improv art in concert with a gospel choir and jazz band. We ran up the steps to get our seat, and soon it began: Michael Arthur, a live visual artist, did spectacularly moving and surprising pen and ink drawings to the jubilant uplift of the church’s righteous gospel choir, and then to the Matt Otto quartet.
We were mesmerized, but more mesmerization was yet to come: stepping outside and walking back to Mass. St., we passed amazingly-blue-lit windows in the huge Turnhall building. Then we realized what filled the windows was a backlit cityscape of many layers of streets that quickly morphed into seven flowing rivers from around the world, piled up in strips of blue, brown and gray flowing water. A man on the street explained to us that he had just met the artist, Tiffany Carbonneau, who travels the world, filming what he encounters, and then projects the images from inside buildings, such as this one. We marveled at the rushing rivers, including the Yangtze from China.
Back out this morning, I found myself sitting next to Denise Skeeba from Homestead Ranch at the Farmer’s Market, delighting in the breezy shade, and eating a pistachio creme brulee, torched a minute beforehand by the vendor next to her stand, which all goes to show that you would be nuts to leave the center of the universe.
