There's nothing like a trip to the modern art museum to kick off an evening of surrealism.

I was invited by a guy I used to date, a guy I’ll call Howard. He’s a banker-turned-museum-director who, at the time, was going back to college to get a graduate degree in Museum Studies, and was appalled that I’d never been to a modern art museum before. He needed a merry band of cohorts to share what could only be described as the Yoko Ono Experience, which was opening that night. I had a sick fascination, he had an extra ticket. An evening was born.

I’ve had a bizarre, passing fascination with Yoko Ono since childhood. Like any other red-blooded American girl in love with all things British, I loved the Beatles. But when I was five and saw Yellow Submarine, that 1968 drug-inspired homage to surrealism, bad storylines and corporate dictatorship, it gave me nightmares. The Blue Meanies chased me in my dreams, to such an extent that to this day I still can’t watch the movie, or listen to the song that I had loved to that point because it reminded me of my father, who worked on submarines.  I didn’t so much blame Yoko for the breakup of The Beatles, as much as I blamed her for the Yellow Submarine debacle. Something about that movie tainted The Beatles for me, and I was not going to forgive that easily.

Eventually, my contemptuous childhood fascination with Yoko turned into just plain fascination. I didn’t know until college, for instance, that she was a performance artist in her own right, that in 1966 John Lennon fell in love with her art before he fell in love with her. My friend Christine, a scientist and scourer of garage sales, gave me a copy of Yoko Ono’s book of poetry, Grapefruit. When I finished reading it, it seemed ironic that Christine found it at a garage sale, amongst the other junk that no one wanted. Her words were unimaginitive, uninspiring, and the pages dripped with pretention. I felt like maybe I was missing something. She was the Delilah of the music world, utterly reviled and quite possibly misunderstood. In the name of peace, I needed to Give Yoko a Chance.

So, under the auspices of a free night out, I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to see if, in fact, I was missing anything. Just to be safe, I showed up clad head-to-toe in black, complete with trendy knockoff turtleneck and sunglasses, just to throw off anyone who might peg me as a MOMA virgin.

Anyone who knows anything about art in this town has already been to, and likely complained about, SFMOMA. It’s pleasant enough, people say, and the art is fine, but it just doesn’t grab you, shake you, and demand your attention like other museums of its ilk. Many of my local artist friends call it the bastard stepchild of the modern art museum world, the most important works already taken by its more impressive older siblings like the Guggenheim and the Met in New York, the Smithsonian, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Though it’s considered one of the nations top museums for, say, tech-themed art, we wanted to see more modern classics in its permanent collection, the Chagalls, the Kandinskys, the Picassos, and all that other stuff you had to see on the East Coast. Diego Rivera graced the walls of some of our most beloved city structures with his larger-than-life murals, but other than that and a few other notable exceptions, we were pretty skint when it came to modern masters.

Yoko Ono wasn’t quite what I had in mind when I thought of modern masters, or something that could bring me to patronize my local branch of the national modern art scene, but William de Kooning certainly was. I couldn’t miss both of them, in the same museum, together.

So there I am, walking down the sidewalk in my black skirt and boots, my black leather coat flapping behind me stylishly in the summer breeze at Third and Mission, and I see an arm waving frantically over the crowd. It’s Howard, once again dressed too old for his age in a sports coat and his ubiquitous sweater vest. He’s standing with a normal-looking woman that I presume to be his date. As I approach them, I realize they’re not alone. Standing behind them are Barbie, Ken, a cyberpunk Mr. Rogers, and a group of Wall-Street-meets-Animal-House twenty-something men, smoking cigarettes and vomiting facts about Baseball and their latest conquests in the worlds of business and dating.

I know immediately that this is going to be an interesting evening.

This woman standing behind Howard is unreal. She’s so unreal, in fact, that I’m convinced nothing on her is real. Her hair, her boobs, her nose, her lips – she’s a pre-fab girlie right out of some reality dating show on Fox. She’s MOMA Barbie, and she’s wearing Gucci sunglasses and a dress that gives new meaning to the color “nude.” I’m sure she arrived in a pink box with a cellophane barrier between her face and the rest of the world, and I really want to ask her about it, but don’t feel that it would be an entirely appropriate line of questioning.

I spy the cyberpunk Mr. Rogers, a tall, thin man with a black mohawk who could be David Byrne except for the powder blue cardigan and beige trousers, grasping his large, metallic briefcase in one hand (“This is my art attache,” he would admit later, patting it solemnly.) and his boyfriend’s hand in the other. I liked the boyfriend, a short, red-headed guy who looked like he’d rather be anywhere but there in the middle of it all.

“I absolutely adore de Kooning, he’s my inspiration,” Mr. Rogers says in a sudden burst of unprovoked emotion. “This is the best day of my life.”

His boyfriend and I exchange glances, glances that say, “I’m glad I’m not the only one that finds this strange and uncomfortable.” It’s not the last time we’ll have that particular opportunity.

Heading up the sea of eligible and clearly toxic bachelors was a short guy in an Armani suit and silk tie. He’s talking a lot about art and stock portfolios and investment banking, and while I don’t know much about any of these things, I decipher most of it as complete rubbish. He doesn’t care, because he is talking to MOMA Barbie. He is MOMA Ken, and he’s doing all he can to get into her pants, and she’s oblivious. And no one is surprised.

There’s something intimidating about going somewhere for the first time by yourself, so I was thankful to be heading to a place with such grand potential for being gloriously pretentious with a group of genuine wierdos, certain to detract attention from my own lack of experience around the place. I was dressed in black, I was pulling up the mental back catalogue of art history classes, I was looking smart and sophisticated and savvy about art.

We made our way to the de Kooning exhibit first, because Mr. Rogers had no interest in Yoko Ono. “That Japanese bitch,” he called her, as his boyfriend and I again exchanged worried looks.

Seeing de Kooning’s work in the twenty-first century is kind of like watching Blade Runner after growing up on sci-fi movies. It seems like one big walking cliché. In the 1940s, de Kooning’s work was radical and different, a brilliant break away from where art was at the time. His abstract impressionism was heavily influenced by the cubist movement, fierce gesture drawings that obscured the subject with lines and colors, trying to capture the essence of motion and light. It was bold, it was beautiful, it was strange and unusual and unsettling. But now, after living for sixty years with the work it inspired, we look at it and think it’s tired, nothing that hasn’t been overdone a thousand times. Just so much tissue paper stuck together with oil paint and crayon. People who aren’t into art and where it’s come from don’t understand modern art, don’t get the joke, the challenge that modern art makes to the perception of what art is supposed to be.

So it’s fun, as an art lover, to pretend to be Someone Who Knows a Lot About Art, and see what happens. If it was working for MOMA Ken, it could work for me.

We split up at the exhibit, each person or couple going in a different direction. I pace slowly in front of each piece, my hand stolidly stroking my chin, eyebrow arched, mouth pursed, arms half folded in contemplation. I certainly looked the part, anyway, and was soon followed by a small group of people. I would stop, stand, stroke my chin, and grunt approval, and then the entourage would stop, stand, stroke their chins, and grunt approval. I am fascinated. I feel like a park jogger being followed by a pack of mimes. I laugh, they laugh. I sigh, they sigh. I squint, they squint. It was amusing and unsettling at the same time. I want to turn around and scream at them, “If I jumped off the bridge would you all follow me? Would you?” How many of these people were here to see the art, anyway? How many of them were just here to be seen seeing the art? I finally run away, and find a dark room in which to hide. They scatter, confused, like the tower of Babel has fallen and they must speak their own languages now.

The dark room is showing a film about de Kooning. Our museum party congregates outside the little room, and after a few moments of milling around, the cyberpunk Mr. Rogers throws up his arms, David Byrne style, and declares that he is “definitely over it.” With one last sad, soulful look from his boyfriend (an exchange that said, “I have to go home with this guy. He’s going to want sex, and I just want to watch The Simpsons.” “I know. I’m sorry. Better luck next time.”) they leave. We’d lost the fraternity banker boys somewhere already.  So now it’s just me, Howard, his date, and the MOMA Barbie action couple snogging in the corner.

The Yoko Ono Experience (simply titled Yes, though we were never quite sure what she was saying Yes to) was just around the corner. Her gigantic face stares at us, flirting with us, daring us to sample the forbidden fruits inside, next to an enormous powder blue archway. For a moment I wish Mr. Rogers was here again, because I’m sure he would throw himself against the wall and make someone – anyone! – take a picture. The guy with the mohawk, scowling next to Yoko Ono’s nostril. Now that’s art, I think.

We go inside, and the whole thing is a sort of tribute to Yoko Ono’s career, punctuated by her relationship with John Lennon. Some things make me laugh, like a twenty-minute film of nipple close-ups, a shrieking fly crawling across them in repulsive fashion. Some things make me cry, like Touch Poem, a book of rice paper pages with locks of John Lennon’s hair intermingled with her own. And some things make me think, like Cut Piece, a film of her famous performance art piece, in which members of the audience cut off sections of her clothing with scissors in subtle acts of violence, making her naked, alone, vulnerable. Somewhere in the middle of the exhibit I notice that MOMA Ken is hiking up MOMA Barbie’s dress in the corner, and by the end of it, they’re nowhere to be found.

Howard pulls me aside as his date contemplates taking a bite of an apple on a stand. “You know, she’s not really my date,” he says. “I think she thinks you’re my date, though, and I think it’s making her jealous.”

Thinking back on it, I probably should have had a more subtle response. His face turned red as a hundred eyes turned to look at my sudden guffaw. Howard and I had dated before and it really didn’t work out. We were doomed to a happy friendship, which I didn’t think was so bad.

I get Howard to laugh with me, and soon we’re laughing, and his un-date is walking back over, asking us what’s so funny, and we say it’s nothing, and she screws her face up into some expression of dissatisfaction. We’re all “definitely over it,” that is, Yoko Ono, and I, for one, am hungry. I suggest dinner, but only Howard seems to like the idea. We walk his companion to her car, where she forlornly wishes us a “nice meal,” and drives away. Howard, carless and scared to drive in San Francisco anyway, hops into my Honda and we’re off. And suddenly I’m in a reality series where surrealism isn’t just for museums anymore.

We drive across the city and into the park, and it’s getting dark. Howard turns to me, in the middle of a conversation about medieval literature and religion, and says, “So, do you want to have sex?”

“With you?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“Tonight?”

He smiles at me and touches my arm in that oh-so-much-more-than-friends way, and suddenly the car is swerving, there’s a stop sign in front of me, and a group of angry bicyclists are shaking their fists and pedaling off in disgust. I’m sure that my boyfriend will not be happy about this, given the fact that even I’m not very happy about it.

“No. I wouldn’t have sex with you again,” is the response that leaps from my mouth. Howard suddenly deflates like a sad little balloon, but I don’t care, because suddenly I feel cheap and propositioned, my arbitrary line not just crossed, but sailed over in some giant leap of an inappropriately terse turn of phrase. I start the car again, and we head to a little restaurant near the park, where they serve pizza and soup and Cobb salad and lamb-stuffed flatbread and the best chocolate pie I’ve ever tasted. I’m no longer just hungry. I need to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

Rock star parking space secured, we get a lovely table upstairs, under the open sky and a broken heating lamp. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the pint of lager I inhaled as soon as the waiter brought it, perhaps it was a delayed response to his indecently cavalier proposal, that I wanted to see him squirm. I like to think I was just curious.

“So, Howard, tell me. Have you ever seen a prostitute?”

“What?” He nearly spit out his water. It was certainly non-sequitur, but not any moreso than earlier. My inner bitch was smiling at me, hugging me back.

“You know. Hooked up with a hooker. I’ve known a few hookers, and my boyfriend has a theory that most men have been to see a lady of the night at least once in their lives, but would never admit it. I’m just wondering. Consider it research.”

I wanted to know what made a man at such ease with asking for sex point-blank, but it was the look in his eyes that made me regret it, suddenly. He took a long, slow drink from his water glass, his eyebrows coming together and then moving apart. His thoughts might as well have been printed on his forehead. Should I tell her? Should I lie? He suddenly looked small and boyish. He’d been caught. He never could lie to me, he said. It was no use, I told him. He’d racked up a debt the size of a small country’s national budget with his “little habit.” He was seeing a therapist about it. Yes, he’d definitely been there, done that.

I kind of felt sorry for him.

So, I switch gears and launch into a discussion about the politics of prostitution and the sex industry. We talk about Victorian hookers, personal friends, and Yoko Ono (who, he argued, traded sex for fame, which became infamy, so we might as well call her a prostitute). Other patrons lean in their chairs, their conversations fall silent as we talk candidly about sex and other things most people don’t talk about in public places. He asks me what he should do about the chick who went home, the chick from the museum. He likes her. I tell him to take her to dinner, bring her flowers, take it slow. No propositions on the first date.

After dinner, I drop him off and head home. I kick off my shoes and flip on the television, per my late-night, post-traumatic coping strategy. There’s nothing that takes the edge off a bizarre evening like late night television. No matter how surreal or awful my life gets, I know that It Could Be Worse. At least my boyfriend isn’t my brother, who’s sleeping with my mother, who’s screwing the guy from the liquor store, who secretly works as a stripper. I find a ridiculous dating show, where a Boston lawyer dumps one of the women on his date, a former Playboy bunny, because she “just didn’t work hard enough.”

What broke my patina of horror was the way she told him to go fuck himself. The guy eventually selected a woman who reminded me of MOMA Barbie, and I wondered how she and Ken were doing, if she ever actually had sex with him, and if so, if it was any good, if she was going to hate herself in the morning. And I wondered if, after the whole evening, after the wierdos, the art, the sex talk and Yoko Ono, if I was the only one laughing.