The other night, I attended a fundraiser for the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank and strategy clearinghouse at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Mostly, it was a crowded room filled with progressive semi-luminaries (Andy Stern, Ruy Texeira, etc), your usual political/policy hacks (no disrespect intended).

But some of the galleries on the first floor were open, containing a beautiful collection of about half American and half European art, mostly from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries. And that was why I came. In a city filled with free museums, I am resistant to paying for one and the Corcoran is not free, so I naturally finagled myself a couple of tickets so we could go and see what was open to see. We had done the same thing when we went to an inaugural party there in January 2010, though far fewer galleries were open.

My date and I were cornered by two strange men. One man named Bill described his tangential participation in that nastiness in Beirut in 1982 and the other, named Jean-Pierre described how he had begun “treating his glaucoma” at age twelve (I’ll leave you to read between the lines as to his true meaning).