MONTREAL MEANDERINGS

Because a woman can’t live on fashion and accessories alone, early last month I hustled off to Montreal for a couple of days with my cultural travelling companion event-planner extraordinaire (Party) Barbara Hershenhorn to take in the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. And yes, there was wining and dining and shopping involved. We may wear a lot of black but we aren’t nuns with a vow of abstinence. Abstinence is so overrated.

Me and Barbara at the funky Le Bremner resto in Old Montreal. It is so hot and anti-chic that it has no signage outside and is located in a fusty basement. The food is great but they don’t make any adjustments to the menu. No, I could not have the veg selection without chicken skin on top.

Special holiday packaging for Veuve Clicquot champagne, my fave bubbles, in a Montreal liquor store featuring Rome and Dallas, two cities associated with my brother-from-another-mother John “Junior” Maloney. Better pack a tote if you plan to shop for booze in Montreal. You have to buy a bag to lug your purchases.

This is not Jon Stewart on a random billboard in Montreal but sure looked like it to me.

Me at the Mapplethorpe exhibit doing my best Annie Leibovitz impersonation.

Me and super-sweet sales associate Marie Catherine Noël at the Denis Gagnon atelier on Rue Saint-Paul in Old Montreal. For moi, Gagnon is très formidable, the Rick Owens of Canada.

A prohibitively expensive but fantastic Japanese designer jacket at Cahier d Exercices on Rue Saint-Paul which is curated like Dover Street Market in New York, where I can’t afford to shop either. Old Montreal was dead, dead, dead the afternoon we shopped. We were the only people on the street -- it felt as spooky as an old episode of Twilight Zone. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

This is not a Picasso outtake but another billboard on a Montreal street – you don’t have to go to a museum to see art.

The ceiling at the Ritz Carlton lobby bar where we went for a smart martini references the iconic Palm Court Lounge at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

The aforementioned smart martini at the Ritz Carlton.

This has nothing to do with Montreal but I loved this painting by Colin Stark in the entry of Optical Outlook on Yorkville Ave., where I get all my eye wear.