After breakfast, I returned to my room and, feeling just a tad sleepy, lay down on my bed and took a nap. Waking, I determined to go to the Atelier des Lumieres, where there was a program around Klimt, the painter of “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” or, as it more famously known, “The Woman in Gold.” It was the subject of a film of that name with Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds a few years ago, about Maria Altmann’s quest for repatriation of the painting.
This was not a viewing of the painting, which is in New York, at the Neue Galerie, where I saw it a year or so ago. This was a light show to evoke all that went into Klimt’s paintings. It began with images of Vienna before the Great War, when it was capital to empire, mixed with film footage of the ghosts of that time.
It was the kind of program, that were I a college student, I would wish to see in a slightly altered state.
Leaving, I wandered through parks and stumbled on the Church of St. Matthew, my patron saint, lighting a candle to be shown where I might do the most good in the time I am given.
Leaving there, I wandered through several parks, filled with children and parents, basking in the warm sun of the day, playing on phantasmagorical play devices, including a great spider web of ropes. In one park, there was a high proportion of fathers caring for children. They were watchful while on their cellphones.
Seeing that there was a subway which would take me back to my hotel, I figured it out and took the 9 back to La Muette, my stop, and came back to my hotel to change and go meet Chuck and Lois, who prepared a delightful white fish with a magnificent dill sauce, accompanied by a Puligny Montrachet, one of my favorite white wines. We phoned our friend Larry and, then, before I overstayed my welcome, I slipped into an Uber and returned to the hotel.
Letter from the Vineyard 
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