The Tom Mathews cartoons were selling like hot cakes. Red stickers were going up on the drawings "like measles", said Tom O'Brien, a freight agent who is a long-standing fan.
Numbers coming up: At £50 each, the show of 102 cartoons is on view at the 101 Talbot Restaurant in Dublin's city centre. And the artist is in his 50th year. How does he feel? "I'm pretty damn well delighted that I've lived so long," he said, looking about at his friends on opening night.
The artist Mick O'Dea, who is off to Vermont next March to do some painting, has been talking to Ennis-born singer Maura O'Connell, who was home from Tennessee for the opening of Gl≤ir, the town's new music centre. Plans are afoot to show Irish contemporary art in Nashville in 2003. "Feast not Famine" is the working title, he says.
Dermot Seymour and O'Dea are all set to attend the annual meeting of Aosdβna next week in Dublin.
The poet Tony Curtis, who will be there too, was busy choosing a cartoon by Tom.
Adekunle Gomez and his colleague Gerard Sheridan (who is a younger brother of the brothers Sheridan - Peter and Jim), from the African Cultural Project, were there, taking a break from working on next year's programme.
Catherine Cullen, children's writer and formerly of RT╔, was full of news about her books The Magical Mystical Marvellous Coat, (published in the US by Little, Brown) and The Terribly Thirsty Baby, which is due out next year.
Prof Liam Breatnach, head of Old Irish in Trinity College Dublin, with his wife, the writer Jill Siddall, was there too, with their friend Claire Kilroy from Howth, another writer. Breatnach's own book about the Brehon Laws will be out next year, he says. A raunchy read, we wonder? Exciting, perhaps? He prefers to say "interesting".