‘sensible.’ I dream of the hoop skirts from The King and I. ”
Roy is an academic with a secret passion for exotic automobiles. He drove
three and a half hours to attend a show of Ralph Lauren’s car collection. “I
can dream, can’t I?” He laughs. When he turned sixty, his grown children
gifted him with a vintage Mercedes. He claims that driving it is always an
artist’s date.
The dreams of our artist’s dates have a peculiar way of turning into reality.
Sophy, a teacher of gifted students, began her Francophile dreams with a trip
to a small French bistro. A week later she was at a French movie with English
subtitles, and a week after that she attended an exhibition on Matisse. Soon
afterward she took a course in French cooking and began boning up on her
high school French with the Pimsleur audio disks. The last I heard, she had
rented an apartment in Paris and was planning to spend the month of July
there.
It pays to think of the artist’s date as one half “artist” and one half “date.”
We are out to woo our own consciousness. We plan and execute enticing
adventures. Our excursions may have a romantic overtone as we treat
ourselves the way we wish a lover would treat us. Veronica, a retired high
school principal, reports to me that she goes to the theater solo once a week.
“I thought it would be lonely and I would feel strange. I found it surprisingly
comfortable and I now prefer it to going to the theater with a date.”
I am often asked if artist’s dates must really be undertaken solo and the
answer to that is yes. (We are not alone. We are with our own creative
consciousness.) This makes us catnip to others, but we must resist the
temptation to take them with us no matter how they plead. Why this rigidity?
Because when we are with a significant other, our consciousness is constantly
monitoring their consciousness. We go to a movie and ask ourselves, “Are
they enjoying this as much as I am?” Rather than focusing on our own inner
world, we are focused outward. We are attending not to self but to other.
“At first I found artist dates very difficult,” Maggie, the mother of five,
confesses. “I felt so guilty about claiming time for myself. After a few dates, I
began to feel differently. I began to see that taking time for myself was really