For dinner they brought Thai food from what sounded to be their favorite place in the city. They shared a crab rangoon with me afterward which was quite wonderful. They also each brought their own version of dinner drink. From outside using my awful lip-reading abilities, I thought Sara pinned Dan's fancy-beer as tasting like soap. She actually said it tasted like fish.
After last night's post, I found my answer to criticism. Foot traffic was lighter tonight, but one man in particular stayed through most of the dinner. His words started strong and harshly but I could tell he had been in the academic environment. He did in fact get his MFA in the early 2000's and now teaches latino studies at Northwestern (I believe).
He brought up crucial points about the piece through the lens of his perspective, specifically about gentrification of the hispanic community and the political gestures embodied by the pair in the window. We had a good dialog which seemed to end up by my realizing a need for this awareness and him realizing that he may have been motivated by his own stereotypes of Dan and Sara (specifically as being white). He was surprised later in the night to find that they are a couple, stating he is culturally conditioned to assume lesbians would look or behave differently than what he saw before him.
A word that keeps coming up in conversation and thought over the past nine days is "assumption." I hope that my action in this piece is partly to create a space where assumptions are reanalyzed from both sides of the glass, where one can evaluate perception and expectation about others and ourselves. Tonight was a unique opportunity for that. I'm very glad our critique friend was visiting tonight.
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