Something I didn't learn in law school

 

And there's a very good reason why.  I wasn't even shortlisted for law school.  (Who me?  I'm the one in the back of the room, flipping through the art books, with Daumier's lawyers as close as I came.)

 

 

Those papers on the floor have nothing to do with the familiar spread of scattered documents we've been seeing in the news for months now.   Instead, they're from a planning session for the first painting I've done since I frolicked off to summer camp.

 

The inspiration?  Early in the summer, I received an invitation to a milestone birthday dinner on the East Coast.  It was too far away for me to accept, but I was so intrigued by the party's location that I had to check further -- a restaurant called "Frolic and Detour."  When I searched on-line, I bumped into a dozen websites explaining the legal concept of "Frolic and Detour."  Quick!  I needed a consultation with my personal Lawyer-in-a-Pocket, who runs her own exclusive 5-star restaurant in Upper Manhattan…right out of her own kitchen!!

 

She confirmed, from her days practicing and teaching law, that this is indeed a legal concept.  I received a personal mini-seminar, but I'm making it easy for you -- just skim down to Paragraph 9 here which explains it very simply. 

 

Well! I really didn't need much more to get started as I envisioned a throng of folks, partly frolicking and partly detouring.

 

Carried away, I kept slapping on shapes and colours.

 

At about this stage, I remembered some of my old useful planning practices, but it was too late for anything but abandon.

 

Here's the final version, which would have benefited from a more considered approach.  For the record, it's titled "Frolic and Detour" (of course).  I first considered "Sublime to Ridiculous", but it was hard to spot anything "sublime."

 

Get it?

 

Oh, and I almost forgot.  The Lawyer-in-my-Pocket suggested that if I'm really keen on legal terminology, there are plenty of oddities to tackle. How about "incorporeal hereditaments"?   -- Not to be confused with the corporeal ones.  Is Halloween in the offing?

 

I rest my case with this:  It always takes a while to get back in the swing of things after summer vacation.  At least this gave me practice in remembering how to mix paint colours.