Wednesday in Santa Barbara

I spent the morning working, finally really getting a chance to get into my summer homework after having finished the readings like a month ago. I told myself I’d work until noon, and then go walking up and down State Street, the main drag in Santa Barbara. I considered doing the beach, but I knew I’d really only have time for one thing, and I really wanted to find something local for presents. There hadn’t been much of a chance for me to just go shopping, either, so I figured that was OK. The shops were all over, from random hippie garb to Saks and Nordstroms to going-out-of-business t-shirt shops. There was all sorts of food, too. It was nice to just walk. There were a lot of people, but it had a very different feel than San Francisco. Maybe because I was just browsing, or maybe because everyone else was just browsing and shopping, too, but I felt a lot of at ease here.

At 2:00 ish I went back to the hotel. It was hot, and I was calling Mom and Dad for an actual voice conversation at 3:00. At 5:30, I left for the Painted Cabernet.

This was perhaps one of the things I was most looking forward to on this trip. The Painted Cabernet features a different painting every night, and you go and drink some wine and they teach you how to paint it. They had the room set up in about four sets of tables, all with easels and water cups ready to go. They gave me a stiff sheet of cardboard when I went in, and up at the front of the room were jugs of paint with signs saying how many pumps of each color we needed. I thought this was ingenious, as I’d been wondering if we’d all get big palettes a la Bob Ross or what. I was also handed four brushes rubber banded together, and put at the head of one of the tables, directly facing the teacher. Yay good placement!

I shared my table with a family visiting their son. They were an older couple, and they were so sweet. The dad put a biodome in his skyline, and the mom kept saying how bad she had been at art class as a kid. They were hilarious and very nice to me, talking to me throughout the night and telling me that my painting looked good.

So, the way it worked was that the teacher was up on a platform by the front windows, and she had on a microphone. She’d show us how to do a step, blare some music, and we’d all do the step. She’d wander, make sure we were doing all right, and when most of us had finished, she’d go back and do the next step, then blare some music, and wander again. It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly relaxing. I had been worried I’d get really type-A with the whole night and be upset when things didn’t look exactly like her painting or precisely how I wanted them to, but I was pretty good with just letting my mistakes go! It might have had something to do with the wine I had before I started, and the second glass I got during the break in the middle. Any time I made a mistake, I just said something like Bob Ross would say, like “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents” or “let’s just make that a pretty little cloud.”

I got home around 10:00 or so, and it was so great to see my painting when I woke up this morning. I packaged the heck out of it and sent it home via USPS this morning, and soon it will be hanging in Delaware.