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