I went to a really weird party

Ooops, forgot that Friday (yesterday) was Cat Blog Day. This morning Thisbe told me that a good nap trumps everything except eating and that cleanliness is better than godliness. Feline wisdom from Friday.

Yesterday I pulled a party out of my memory, triggered by a commercial, the rum commercial--looks like South Beach-- where the bartender is making mojitos and pounding the mint and lime into the glass and the dancers are swinging their butts. He stops. They stop. He starts mulling the lime and the mint again. They dance again. I mentioned to S.O. that the first time I had seen sexy dancing like that had been at a beach party down in Ft. Lauderdale and we speculated whether the sinuous swing-your-butt and other parts dancing had come up from South Beach by way of some tropical island.

Thought processes wandered to Boston parties, esp. Boston business parties. I have yet to be present when the ladies didn't all get up to dance, usually to the Electric Slide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Slide

When we first moved here from Chicago I found this odd party custom outre, but now I get up and dance with the girls. Sometimes.

There are a few songs I can't sit still to, YMCA being one, and remembering how I drove to college everyday thru the worst Chicago winter ever jiving to the Village People.

That memory, of the women dancing together triggered a more distant one, of the night the men got up and danced but not together. I won't even say how long ago it was, but I was in college for the first time, home for the summer in Denver, working for my Dad, bored out of my mind and looking for adventure which I never found but came close a couple times.

I had a friend who had dropped out of college. We share the same first name and were both sort of blond and didn't have much in common except that we liked boys and also the business about being bored and wanting adventure. All that jazz. So, we hung out, and doubled dated sometimes, a quaint custom from the Dark Ages of dating.

I can't remember how we met the people where the party was. Obviously her connection, not mine. The host was a neer-do-well salesman who received stolen goods on the side (found that out later) and the hostess, his wife, was 18 and had just had her 4th child. Having so many kids so young and so close together and done a number on her reproductive system and she had also had a hysterectomy at 18. I don't think I had a date. We were just hanging out. The only other guy I actually remember was a big man, looked kind of like John Goodman and he sold shoes at the shopping center down the down from where my folks lived.

The college I was attending at the time, known sometimes as the Harvard of the Southwest, was an intellectual place--I was ready Ulysses that summer--and obviously I knew I was slumming, but yanno, adventure and boredom and all that.

So about 8 people were sitting at the end of the evening in an 8 x 8 living room--(8 is a lucky number in Chinese cultures but don't think it applies here). There wasn't room enough for everyone to sit, but my friend and I, being the ladies present, sat on the sofa. The host's wife had been dancing by herself to Honeybee (?). Think that was the name of the song. Anyway, all the guys agreed to get up and dance, one at a time, quite a novelty. There was a dim floor lamp and an even dimmer overhead light, and a record player, or maybe a radio, and each guy danced to a song. The one I remember was the shoe salesman, such a large guy and so light on his feet and with a serious look of concentration--not quite a frown on his face--and there was something moving about him and his concentration and his dancing and even his pride, such that I remember it to this day, the man sliding and gliding over the small middle of the living room floor. An epiphany.

I don't think I ever saw these people again, except once I went into a shoe store and saw the salesman/dancer and did an about face. My friend had a shotgun marriage the following summer to an extremely unsuitable man, had three boys, got divorced, married another man in Montana, who "showered her with diamonds" as my mother never tired of telling me. I graduated.

What could be crazier than life?

Grapeshot

James Joyce

Here is a link to an essay about Joyce's Ulysses which is so readable and lucid that I have to share--a bit about Rushdie too, but mostly Joyce.

http://greatliteraryworks.blogspot.com/2007/08/crucial-book-of-salman-rushdie.html

We watched last night, via On Demand, The Good German. The better parts of the movie were "real" scenes of postwar Berlin from old documentaries. The story was cliched to the max, but George Clooney is always easy to look at (ask Ms Snark), even when he's been beaten up beaucoup times. I won a tee shirt in a short, short story I made up about the movie poster. Actually, my story was better. No humblesness this morning. But: what the hell does one do with a tee shirt that reads "The Good German"? I have to confess I gave it to the VietNam Vets. It was also kind of small. The stupid-ass decisions we have to make every day.

Writing group meets tonight. Still need to get those agent letters for Promiscuous Mode out. The agents ain't gonna line up on my doorstep without communicatio, without queries, without synopses, without killer first chapters.

Festival Madness is almost ready, still lacking the killer first paragraph with a 'Hook.' The book one is writing is always the best one.

I'm having serious doubts about the marketability of the YA we are planning. The current wisdom is to write the book you love, the book you must write, but that wisdom hasn't produced anything but (at least) two unpublishable books. So I dunno.

Now for breakfast: Cheerios with vanilla yogurt, 2% milk, and half a banana. Good! Good for you! Some nutritional nazi will come out of the woodwork saying drink skim, not 2%. To them my cat's middle paw. Ooops! Friday is cat blog day.

Alors!

Grapeshot