Here's my Vermeer CSB:

I was a first-year art history grad student at U. Maryland when the Vermeer show at the National Gallery of Art opened in the late '90s. In the Washington, DC and American art scene, it was a Big. Farking. Deal. The curator, Arthur Wheelock, taught a seminar class on Dutch art that I took that semester. He gave us a private behind-the-scenes tour of the show, which was incredible. I gave my first grad research paper in that class and at the end, he had to interject that I was overtime because I was so...farking...nervous I failed to see that he was tapping on his watch telling me to wrap it up. But I had tunnel vision staring at my pics on the projector screen, due to nerves, and I didn't notice his first, subtle attempts. I mean, who the fark was I to be giving a paper about Vermeer to the foremost Vermeer scholar in the country?

Well, it turned out that, despite my terror, he really liked my paper--so much so that he actually cited it in an article he wrote soon thereafter. You hear stories of grad students' research getting ripped off so often by their advisors, and this guy did the right thing and properly cited my work because I found something he found legit useful. It's pretty rare for anyone to cite a grad school seminar paper rather than some published article or book--but he's such a class act that he cited a grad seminar paper alongside all the peer-reviewed sources he used.

And for those of you who like paintings, Vermeer's are worth walking over broken glass to see up close.

/art historian