In the Meeting of Great Minds, Admit Impediments!

Tina was preparing to be terribly wrong. Places such as these had a way of making her slightly uncomfortable. Was it the artists? Was it the way people dressed? She blinked. Was that a man, or a woman?

Tina and her boyfriend stood outside the gallery, the yawning doors waiting to swallow them whole.

Tina, loosen up, Eric was saying. The artwork is nothing short of phenomenal; Catherine has this obstinate way of making you meditate on her photographs; and so does the gallerys owner.

This Porter person?

Porter person? Eric laughed. Shes certainly more than that.

So Tina had heard. Seeing the sign with The Bette Porter Gallery in gigantic lettering, she sighed and could only speculate that anyone who had their name in such imposing font could be anything but unsuccessful. The air-conditioning brought some form of relief but glancing about, she contemplated on what Eric had told her in sedition to get her to come.

Bette Porter probably had the most intimidating reputation as a gallery owner in L.A.s innovative artist community. The talents of the artistic underground went to her; the pioneers landed on her roster; the most gifted of the bunch, without credentials to their name, for as long as the art evoked all the right reactions or all the wrongs ones, found their work hanging on her gallery walls. Only to see that after a week of being featured, they were being invited to reputable museums and getting reviews that no one had bothered to write beforehand.

To be invited to her dinners was a romp in artistic lavishness and a chance to meet the very best of up-and-coming trend-setters, hybrid-breeders, and discourse-defying brush-wielders. It seemed Porter had a nose for the future and its worth; to look to the past for reference, to touch the future for limits, and plugging all denominations into the present.

Always, Tinas visits to different galleries were steps into the world of other-ness, of an alien quality, such that when Tina found herself in that space, it was she who felt helplessly out of place. Not that Eric had the exceptional ability of actually sensing this; so she drifted near him, willed him to turn to her and at least explain this desire for eccentricity, which bit poor Eric like a bug when it pleased him. But as an entertainment lawyer, the bug bit him more often than not.