The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Remember those days when you would wait for your parents to leave the house so you could invite your girl- or boyfriend over for an evening of videos and cheap wine and illicit sex?

Well, here's a funny thing. Those days return, when you're 42 or so. . . .You discover there's a Friday evening coming up. The kids are going to be out -- one at a sleepover, the other doing whatever high school seniors do -- and you plot. You get a DVD from Hollywood and a cheap bottle of wine and think about how you're going to have the house all to yourself.

Ah. . . .the romance of middle age.

My husband and I recently ran into just such a Friday night. Teenage daughter at a friend's house; adult son out for most of the night. We ran out to rent a film we'd been wanting to see ever since it hit Uptown for about ten minutes last winter then disappeared and opened a bottle of Tiziano Chianti 2005.

The film was called Starting Out in the Evening, a sleeper from 2007 that sprang from a book by Brian Morton, whose entire canon I happen to have read.

Morton is a fascinating writer. Around 50, Jewish, a New Yorker. He clearly has some personal demons to excise. Each of his books covers much the same ground: There is some combination of an older, Jewish, intellectual writer -- a contemporary of Bellow's and Roth's -- a 40-ish woman who is grappling with her desire to have children, a leftist, and an aged but understanding therapist. Morton is, in my experience, the most formulaic writer on the planet today. Yet what he produces is at once readable and fresh. Each time he enters the same territory he has something strangely new to say. He comes at it from a different facet. He makes this single story work, over and over again.

So it is with this film. It's the story of a 70-year-old novelist (Frank Langella) whose books have all fallen out of print. He is trying to finish that one last novel that will become his legacy when a graduate student (Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame) appears at his door to tell him she is writing her thesis about his body of work. Meanwhile, his daughter and -- for all intents and purposes -- best friend, played by Lily Taylor, is turning 40 and debating whether or not to trick her childless-by-choice boyfriend into an "accidental" baby.

There were rumors Langella would be nominated for an Academy Award for Starting Out, and I think it's a shame he was not. He is a burly, bullet-shaped elderly man, yet he managed to turn from obdurate to frail after his character suffered a stroke. The scene in which his daughter's boyfriend must haul the old man out of the bathtub -- chest to chest, dripping wet; in some way getting the "child" he was so determined never to have -- was worth an Oscar nomination alone.

But back to the evening, OUR evening and the wine. Chianti generally is made out of Sangiovese grapes. It is the cousin of other richer Tuscan reds, such as Montepulciano and Carmignano. But Chianti tends to be smooth and forgettable -- a thin table wine with no real character.

This one, however, blew me away -- especially for the price, which is around $9 a bottle. Sweet strawberry and honey married with a sturdy, dry, deep forest oak, it's a light but sophisticated wine. A perfect match for the quiet, poignant film. Exactly right for two exhausted parents grateful simply to be sprawled across each other like puppies in a large chair, drinking in the quiet on a Friday night.

So it seems the kids from Fame (who, by the way, are now eligible for AARP) have gotten together with Cyndi Lauper and a couple writers from the early days of Saturday Night Live to adapt Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Guthrie.

That, and I suppose Joe Dowling had a hand in it, too.

This is a wild, colorful, aggressively sexual production. And by that, I don't mean sexy. "Sexy," to me, is nuanced and flirtatious, suggestive, tempting, a little bit hidden. Sexual is in your face. It's full frontal, bumping and grinding. It's Ground Zero. It's Rich Goldsmith's headlines. It's Namir Smallwood's Puck in a glittering coral codpiece.

This is not to say I didn't like the play. There were wonderful dance numbers, great (skimpy) costumes, and a fabulous sparkly egg in which Titania and Bottom the ass get it on. I enjoyed the Guthrie's production for what it was: grand spectacle.

But I did miss the air of sweetness and optimism that typically wafts through Midsummer Night's Dream. This is a play I associate with whimsy and tentative romance and the suspension of disbelief. It is, in my experience (which involves seeing it perhaps five other times on stages including the former Guthrie's and studying it in Stratford-upon-Avon) a story about the mischievous yet goodnatured spirit world that helps guide the loves and lives of mortals. It contains a play within a play — which was executed beautifully in the Guthrie's current production as wry slapstick — and a layering of comical missed chances, magic, and a sense that everyone will be rightfully paired in the end.

Contrast that with Dowling's modern vision: An alien landscape in which sci-fi fairies drop from the sky and prod underwear-clad couples to lurch from love to lust and back to love again.

If you go for this sort of thing, I urge you to see it and stop by Cue on your way up for a glass of Flor de Pingus 2005. This Spanish red from the Ribera del Duero region is fruity and floral on the nose. But it tastes completely different than it smells: earthy, plummy, and HOT. I mean, this wine scorches on the way down your throat; it's dry on the tongue, and the finish is pure whisky.

Flor de Pingus is like a well-built Spanish guy in tight leather. . . .You know, someone old enough to know what he's doing but young enough to do it well. At 14.8% alcohol and a little more than $100 a bottle, it costs about the same as two tickets to the show.

But this wine is really sexy, not just sexual. It has shades and nuances, and an impish, spiritual gleam. Which is, if you ask me, well worth the price of admission.