James and I went to see the new Calder exhibit at Tate Modern. The theme was performing sculpture. It started with his wire sculptures, which are works of pure genius. The wire portrait of Leger was worth the visit by itself. Then, according to the show notes, Calder visited Piet Mondrian in his studio and his entire world changed. He pretty much gave up most of his representational art in favor of abstract. There were a lot of motorized works from the 1930s, many of which had never been shown together since they were made. And then the mobiles, some of them with gongs worked into them, so they would randomly make sounds. It was all magical, in a way that few artists other than Calder can be. My only objection is that there were not enough breezes wafting through the exhibits and the mobiles were too static.

Judie and James and I were wandering around Mayfair, looking for a place to eat. We were walking up Regent Street, checking out the incredibly gaudy Christmas decoration, when we decided to cut down a little side street called Heddon Street. One of my discoveries in walking around central London is that there are lots of little side streets and alleys that are sometimes lined with restaurants and pubs. This was a tiny, L-shaped street with six or seven restaurants. We decided to try Heddon Street Kitchen, which advertised itself to be a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. We were eating our dinner in the lounge area (the dining room was full), when James said he thought he saw Gordon Ramsay. We scoffed, figuring why would he come to this little place out of all of the big and famous places he operates in London. But on the way out, we looked closer and it was him, sitting at a table of people including several who looked a lot like him. I read in the paper the next day that he was visiting his family from the US.

A few days later, James and I are on the Underground and I grabbed a seat next to this older, well-dressed guy and began to read my Evening Standard, the free paper that they give away all over the place. All of a sudden this guy across the way begins talking to the gent next to me. He had a ridiculous Cockney accent, so I couldn’t understand him at first, but I eventually figured out that the guy next to me was some sort of manager of the West Ham footie team. (I checked later and it was Sam Allardyce, who was the manager of West Ham, but is now the manager of Sunderland.) After an extended, semi-understandable conversation between the two, I ended up taking a cell phone photo for the fan guy.

After that, we got off the Piccadilly line in Leicester Square to go the Soho Theatre where we going to see an Australian comedian (who turned out to be pretty funny). We could barely get into the Square and it turned out that we had stumbled into the Star Wars premier. It was a madhouse, although we almost got to where the red carpet was somehow. (The security wasn’t great at that point.) We didn’t see Harrison Ford or any of the stars (although they were there later and the pictures were on the front page of the papers). After the comedy show, we went to dinner at this restaurant in Chinatown that we like and were walking back to the tube and found ourselves completely surrounded by people carrying light sabers. They accompanied us all the way back to Liverpool Street. See below. We were safe in case Sith warriors attacked.