After Hours at SAM for a Remix à la Picasso (Photo Essay)

If there's a more fun way than a Remix to visit the monumental Picasso exhibition ongoing at SAM, I'm not sure what it could be, and I suspect it isn't likely to be legal. Museum members get a special entrance and a lounge all their own, but regular people like you and me can also buy tickets (and do, the Remixes frequently sell out) and enjoy the slightly illicit thrill of taking over a museum for the night, having a drink or two, and discovering a wide range of amusements. 

Here's what you missed from last night's extravaganza:

The evening began with people milling about, drinking wine and listening to the marimba-playing, chanson-française-crooning Erin Jorgensen. There was a French culture theme on account of the Picasso exhibit coming from the Musée National Picasso, but it was also Seattle-French, like it had just biked down from Café Presse on Capitol Hill.

After Jorgensen came the Harlequin Hipsters, "Seattle's premiere partner dance improv troupe." That description seems complete but it does leave out the hula hoops.

I am notoriously bad at matching face to names, but if you want to give it a shot, here are the Hipster players. As you can see, they supply the ambiance.

Then arrived the sassiness of the Heavenly Spies, whose can-can dance mastery can be viewed at the Can Can. (That's them in the first photo, up top, too.) Pernod Absinthe was sponsoring the event so as you watched the dancing, a woman circulated among the crowd offering a sample absinthe spoon.

But it was not all DJ TigerBeat's dance music (with impromptu singalong by Seattle's young and chic to "Livin' on a Prayer"); up on the fourth floor you could wander the galleries to harp accompaniment, only to notice the songs were oddly familiar--anything from arrangements of Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" to The Eagles' "Desperado." Chilling.

You could watch video of a Dutch girl very hard trying to sketch a Picasso.

You could play trivia. If you're wondering about the sailor hats at the far table: The first 50 people wearing a sailor's outfit got in free. Almost everything about the museum experience is improved by having 50 people in sailor outfits wandering about.

You could have your portrait taken.

Or you could take the Portrait Challenge, and draw one yourself.

Portrait Challenge accepted! Kanye and bug-Kanye.

Crowds thronged the Picasso exhibit itself, of course. Everyone got a ticket with a 20-minute window, so that you could still move about. The exhibit comes with accompanying audio narration, which you listen to on "wands" that are about the size of an opened clam-shell cell phone. They're very popular, but you can also see that the attentional bottleneck that makes cell phone listeners bad drivers extends to walkers, too. The Remix may be over, but the Picasso exhibit runs through January 17.