Yesterday, during the worship service at church, Zach tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, Mark, I know it’s short notice, but I’m leaving the service early to go to the art museum in Atlanta. It’s for my Art Appreciation class. You want to come?”

“Uh, sure!”

So, we left the service and drove down to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where we spent a couple of hours looking at the Picasso and Van Gogh exhibits. It was a lot of fun, getting cultured, and getting caught up with Zach on what’s gone on in town for the past decade – who’s married whom, who’s come out of the closet, who’s on the Board of Education, etc. Working as a reporter for the local paper, he has his finger on the pulse of the town (and his wife working as the Republican Party coordinator for the county doesn’t hurt, either). I asked him how accurate most of the rumors are that he hears, and suggested the accuracy was pretty high. One of the things about a small town, he pointed out, was that rumors are easily verifiable. If something’s just a malacious lie, it gets discovered pretty quickly.

I found out that a close childhood friend of mine, Trung, is now married and working as the manager of a Best Buy in a nearby town. I was glad to hear it; I hadn’t heard anything from him since I left for college nearly ten years ago.

Of course, the Van Gogh exhibit wasn’t anything to pass lightly over, either. But it was the second serious dose of culture I got this weekend: Last Friday, I saw A Winter’s Tale at the Shakespeare Tavern. None of us English majors had seen or read it before (except for the department head, and it was so long ago he couldn’t remember it). After I saw it, I realized why it wasn’t as famous as some of Shakespeare’s other plays. A Winter’s Tale could be described as “Just like Much Ado About Nothing, only not as good.” The plot is the same: faithful woman accused of adultery, is exonerated, fakes death to punish husband, later reveals herself to be alive. The plot isn’t as tightly woven as Much Ado, the characters are less developed, and there aren’t as many quotable lines. Also, some characters go sailing to Bohemia (a landlocked country). It was good to see, though.