A live band in a bowling alley? A little girl as a go-go dancer? In this shambling, exotic town, it all seems perfectly normal.

The young go-go dancer is, in this context, downright wholesome - family entertainment, Cajun-style: The family that zydecos together stays together. The turbocharged regional musical stew of R&B, rock-and-roll, and French Acadian, carried by electric guitar, bass, drums, accordion, and corrugated metal rub board worn as a vest, somehow seems like music you've heard all your life. The crawfish quesadillas and gumbo that the sweat-drenched dancers devour seem as familiar as Mom's Sunday dinner.

Of it all, the crowd, mirroring the melting-pot music, is perhaps the weirdest element of the night, given that its mishmash is nearly unrecognizable to those of us - which is to say, most of us - who rarely socialize with people who don't look like us in one way or another. This is a dance hall that looks like America, or some ideal of what we hope America looks like when it is perfected: all races (black, brown, white, red), all ages (from dynamic young to doddering old), all socio-economic classes (men with Marine haircuts and neatly pressed shirts two-step with their skirted gals alongside guys with tattoos boogieing with their pedal-pushing gals).

Taking it all in, that old traveler's feeling washes over me, the one I remember getting on a cold night under a starry sky in Florence as I licked a perfect gelato, the one that came over me in Barcelona while I sipped wine on the carnivalesque promenade called the Rambla, the one that swept me up while I swam in a creek in the cedar-speckled folds of the Texas Hill Country, the one … well, you get the idea, the one I get everywhere that makes me want to look at local housing prices.

Joining the fray in this smoky, beery, frenzied dance-hall-slash-bowling-alley, I take Jessica onto the dance floor. A few songs later, we take a break. I'm panting so hard, I fear I might have a heart attack