Holiday Hop — By Golly, We Live in a Pretty Cool Town!
December 2, 2007
With Julie’s mom in town for a few weeks, we’ve been doing our best to take advantage of the free sitting to get out a bit. From little things like making an ice cream run to bigger things like pulling off a bona fide date night, it’s been nice! Of course, I’m flying down to Austin this evening for the week, so we won’t get to take advantage of that again until next weekend.
Last night, we headed to downtown Columbus to an area called The Short North. Last night was the first Saturday of the month, which is the monthly Gallery Hop event — or the Holiday Hop due to the season. In Austin terms, the area/event has a Sixth Street feel with South Congress-like galleries in place of music venues. Julie picked up a World AIDS day ribbon, and we both signed a petition to get Barack Obama on the ballot in Ohio (no guarantees that he’ll get our vote in the primary, but he ought to at least have the requisite signatures to get on the ballot!). We had drinks and an appetizer at one restaurant, then did some more gallery/shop-hopping. Julie was quite chatty — striking up conversations with the staff in at least half of the places we stopped!
The most interesting conversation we had was with Paul Palnik. He is a cartoonist/satirist who does elaborate, poster-sized comic-like pieces. Many of them are heavy on words. Many have a ton of cartoon people. And many have both. Palnik is a lifelong cartoonist who, he said, actually taught art at several universities but gave that up because simply being an artist was more lucrative and that’s what he really loves to do. The pieces were fun, in that you literally could stand in front of them for an hour taking in all the details and chuckling here and there. The music playing in the gallery was a CD of Palnik’s son, Elijah Aaron, who is finishing up at the Berklee College of Music. We bought his CD and, I suspect, will be buying a piece or two of Palnik’s work down the road.
Over dinner — our favorite “dinner composed of a couple of appetizers with a shared light main dish” — we wound up kicking around some of our “relationship anecdotes,” including a story that I’ve told to many, many people over the years…but never to Julie, I realized. And, it’s about Julie. That may be a subject for another post, but I’ll need to get clearance from the main subject before that happens!
Stay tuned!
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