Jan 19, 2007
Friday night, Detroit celebrated the opening of our North American International Auto Show, the one hundredth observance, and I didn't buy tickets for the charity preview nor the Automation after glow on Woodward Avenue's Museum of Contemporary Arts Detroit. Yet, I could enjoy the buzz and see the limousines disburse their tuxedoed and begowned passengers before the Whitney and the tent-clad MOCAD from the front door of the DAM, Detroit Artists Market. I confirmed later that many of those high-ticket-price partiers waited as long as an hour for their chariots to be delivered by valets at Cobo Hall. Marsha Miro had selected multi-media works for a show to celebrate the 75th anniversary of DAM, and I dropped in for the final hour, closing mercifully delayed until 10:00 PM, when the cheese tray offered only crackers, yet the grape tray still offered green and purple clusters and a bartender still poured plastic glasses of vino from bottles smaller than a jug but larger than a 750 ml bottle, offering white or red tasty blends.
I immediately encountered a cluster of friends, Ed Gardiner and his armcandy-of-the-night Suzanne Janik of Cranes Detroit and Marcia and Dennis of Marcia Hovland Gallery, Royal Oak. Ed's star is rising as more people are drawn to InZero, partly due to the quality of the story and the teams putting it on the silver screen monthly and mostly for the party circuit sprung up around the production weekends. Marcia and Dennis are holding their own, waiting for their customers to discover their store, begin buying decorative items again and the ultimate and certain apotheosis of Marcia's work, full of feminine mystique and quirky wisdom. Much to my surprise, I spotted Teresa Schierloh of the Dancing Eye Gallery, galleries in Northville and Walled Lake, snapping pictures of artists with her cellphone camera, flash-equipped. She was attending with her staff from the stores, and we all gathered on the Woodward sidewalk frontage of DAM to view the excitement. Clearly, it was time to dump the DAM and promenade between the MOCAD and the Whitney, and I happily came with when Schieloh and her gang of four art geishas sashayed down to the Union Street Saloon, glad to be picked up by the fivesome.
The Union Street had crowded with all those Detroiters who had rated a ticket to the Charity Preview, and we had to sit at the two round tops at the bench by the host's lecturn. I reviewed the wine list, and I was stunned to see Los Alamos Malbec, vintage 2005 on the menu for 33.00 the bottle, only a four-fold markup of the internet price. I looked no further, and while the geishas order beers, for Teresa a framboise, I asked for five glasses. I didn't need to sniff the cork and I disdained to sip the sample, and our geishas allowed the waiter to pour only an inch or so in their glasses. One announced her role as designated driver, the one with the red hair with blonde streaks, remarried to a man who brought her twice to the Leelanau Peninsula for a weekend wine tour, on snowmobiles. The second running of the event, the wineries scheduled it for two days to prevent crashes. I never learned her name. Teresa wanted her to know, though, that I was too a divorcee, although still a bachelor unconfirmed and not even close to reupping for a second marriage. Teresa was also goading her friend, Linda, to get back into the swim, implying that I was an eligible fish. I like Linda, who had worked as a sales executive for Kelly Services in the consultant and leased employee division. After all, there's only two business where talented people are sent to addresses, instructed to make the client happy, and one of those are illegal. If you squint, even the contract employee business starts to look like human traffiking.
Panna, Teresa's business partner and her friend from art school photography classes raved of the flavor and nuance of her pour of Malbec, although she didn't ask for a refill, and she left our tables first to go home, before the hour of Eleven P.M. Teresa was planning to be selling arts and crafts by nine the next morning, Saturday her biggest selling day, and she finished her bottle of framboise beer, but she left most of her glass of Malbec. I experienced this phenomena at the Bastone Bar of Royal Oak, attractive women experiencing a glass of Jekel Riesling from grapes grown on Monterray's peninsula, not drinking it to the lees and barely drinking it at all.
I had never witnessed such behavior at the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant in San Francisco or Vino Venue at Third and Mission. Heck, in all my time in Napa, Sonoma, Santa Barbara and Niagara, I've never witnessed a taster spitting out good wine into a spitoon. The cool hottie on her second marriage, who must have been a pleaser personality because she was designated driver that night ,asked me for the cork. I was happy to pass it over because she wants to cork an entire wall with them, so she's got a lot of bottles to sample before Stevlin and plastic corks wipe out the woody cylinder. I stood up to say good bye, and Linda, Teresa and the hottie with no name gave me hugs and pecks on the corner of my smile, so the hour wasn't a total loss, although I had gone from four dates to dateless before Eleven PM.
So I moved from my cane chair to the wooden bench, the better to view the arriving Detroiters and drink my final glass of Malbec, knowing I shouldn't drink a glass or so that remained in the bottle. I was down to the dregs in my glass; an optimistic wine drinker will say I had drunk my glass to the lees, and a Jewish friend might encourage me to crush the glass with my heel. Then, all the cultural workers from the Detroit Artist Market, women in their twenties making their way through Detroit's thin art jungle, paraded in after closing down the shop with a tidy up, and I pressed the bottle upon a petite woman with long black perhaps Latin hair, dressed in an antique green shift, one that could be lifted over and off her body in a single move. She accepted the bottle with glee, kissed me on the corner of my smile, and drank lustily of its contents. The host had found the commisars a long table for all twelve of them, and she blew a kiss and lifted the bottle once more and sashayed into the dining room.
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William Juntunen
989-906-3324
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