Saturday, May 16 - Monday, May 18: California Weekend

On Saturday, I flew to Orange County alone, on a spontaneous trip to see an art exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art. I'd learned only a couple of weeks ago--thanks to an idle Google search--that the museum was currently showing the first-ever North American retrospective of one of my very favorite artists, Sophie Calle, and that it was closing on May 24. It had been in Minneapolis but would not be traveling elsewhere in the U.S. I've seen a few of her exhibitions in New York and Paris, but not for a long long time, so I decided to go. 

And it was so great! I arrived around noon on Saturday 5/16, checked into my hotel, which was right across the street from the museum, and then spent the next four hours with Sophie Calle's work. Some of it I was familiar with, some I'd seen in galleries in the past, and some was new to me as well as brand-new and never shown before. What a treat to wander the rooms, reading all the text, sitting with it. I took a little lunch break at the museum cafe. 

In the evening, I met Michelle for dinner--my college roommate I haven't seen in person for years. She drove down from LA and picked me up. We took a quick walk through the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve then had dinner at Zinque in Newport Beach, looking out over the boats in the harbor. It was so nice to catch up. 

Sunday, I took a walk around the lake in the middle of the hotel complex and spent a little time reading on a bench. I had a late breakfast at the Silver Trumpet, the restaurant in my hotel, and then headed back to the museum when it opened at 11. I spent a few more hours there, leisurely following a tour group for a while to eavesdrop on the commentary (it was hard not to pipe up with my own), jotting down some notes and thoughts and quotes. I was moved to tears by many of these pieces. I loved the whole thing and was sad to finally call it a day. I didn't want to leave the show behind.

Late in the afternoon, I walked to the South Coast Plaza, an elaborately high-end mall where there was a line outside Cartier and Louis Vuitton, but it was so crowded I had a teeny panic attack and had to just get out of there as fast as possible. Of course I couldn't find my way out (but finally did). I'd planned on having dinner at Din Tai Fung inside the mall, but the wait for a table was three hours and it was absolutely packed with people. Intent on having a nice weekend and not, you know, getting stuck in CA with some kind of illness, I ordered some food to-go from their app, waited outside the mall for my order to be ready, and had a nice quiet dinner with my book back at the hotel.

I left very early Monday morning, flew home, and that was the weekend. In true Maycember fashion, Andrew was on his way to Spain for work, and met me at my gate. Ships in the night.

What a great weekend. I'm so very very glad I got to see this exhibition. I hadn't been back to California since 2017, and even though I wasn't anywhere near our old haunts, it was still nice to (briefly) be there.