November 20, 2014

NIGHTLIFE IN SANTA FE

NIGHTLIFE IN SANTA FE

[Thanks for and to several compliments on my website (notably chock full of interesting stuff) and my first blog posting about dancing, I think I’m ready to get regular about this thing.  While in my youth I used to have trouble prioritizing inspirations, as I got older it got to be more of a yes or no question.  Now at my venerable age, I’ve got to balance the time and attention I give to several weighty priorities.

My multi-tasking isn’t doing several things at once, but rather synchronously.  I seem to turn focus like a searchlight from one obsession to another, largely by sheer will-power—and calendar-power.  If I’m going to blog, by golly, it better be on the calendar.  So, for the moment, I’m going to mark Thursdays for new postings.  Keep checking in on me!]

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Regarding nightlife and dancing in Santa Fe NM, as I mentioned before, for the past few years the Rouge Cat had been Santa Fe’s more or less gay dance bar.  To my horror, without any fanfare or folderol, soon after my first posting it closed.  In fond memoriam of the Rouge Cat, here’s a cursory history of my dancing venues here in Santa Fe.

On visits in the late 70’s, I’d go to the Senate Lounge, a venerable bar just around the corner from the bus station.  It was my first experience of a “mixed” bar.  By the time I moved to Santa Fe for real in 1983, the Senate was gone, and being in a relationship, I didn’t go out very much.  Still, there were a few dance occasions at a great place called Club West on Alameda and another called El Paseo on San Francisco Street.  Then came the Cargo Club followed by Club Luna on Cerrrillos (or the other way around?).  After that my partnered years became a blur, and by the early 90’s I didn’t know from night spots.

Once single again in those early 90’s, I danced at the Club 414 on Old Santa Fe Trail, where I first encountered Oona’s disco wildness.  I found myself dancing on a table, starting a tradition of six or seven tables along one wall as go-go boy stands. Within a year or so the action moved to the Drama Club on Guadalupe Street, with a stage where we danced like wild people and had great holiday parties for hot, shirtless frenzies.  It reigned for a few years, only to be replaced by the same owners’ Paramount, a glitzy space on the corner of Montezuma and Sandoval.  That was a glorious institution for several years hosting Oona’s regular Wednesday Trash Disco, and life was exceedingly good.  But it closed; they tore it down, dug an enormous hole, and built the new Santa Fe County Courthouse.  Sic transit gloria.

With the passing of the Paramount, there was a drought for some time (years?) until Oona started dance nights at the lounge at Rainbow Vision, a gay retirement community, now called something less vivid.  There was a little stage where I shook my beauty with vigor and sweaty abandon.  Then the entrepreneurial Paramount owner opened the Rouge Cat, and the dance scene got a new lease on life.  For about four years.

Since my first posting, dancing this year was really difficult, with an occasional youth party at Molly’s Kitchen with electronic dance music (EDM, which I’m trying to appreciate) or a couple hugely appreciated Trash Disco nights at the Palace Restaurant.  That is, up till a month or so ago when there was a revolution in Santa Fe’s nightlife.  Maybe it had something to do with the election of Javier Gonzales as the city’s new mayor?

Suddenly music events started happening all over the place on the weekend nights, and walking around the (old) downtown almost reminded me of the (old) French Quarter.  What’s more, wonder of wonders, two new dance bars have opened!  First the Skylight on San Francisco, a huge place with a gallery overlooking the dance floor, and then the Blue Rooster, a reincarnation of the Rouge Cat, now as a self-proclaimed gay bar, with the familiar dance floor downstairs and Oona presiding on Saturday nights.

You’d think I’d be in hog heaven, but last weekend it was cold out and I wasn’t really feeling like driving downtown.  Instead, I realized that with that great Pandora online music system it was no problem.  I pulled up a “cumbia colombiana” station and danced shirtless and in slippers in my living room for a good hour and a half.  Dancing with eyes closed, I peeled away a half century and was once again in the mad third room of La Casa de los Marinos.  Maybe tonight I’ll pull up Greek and visit the Gin Mill, but on Saturday I’ll be at the Blue Rooster.  Promise.

 

 

January 28, 2014

The Motto

Welcome, readers, to the inaugural issue of my blog.  First, I must deliver a

MESSAGE FROM ALPHA CENTAURI

I want to have come unto your world
Like a comet, or better,
A wandering sun,
Spark of invisible systems,
Flashing a solar radiance
On the night sides of your eyes.
I want to burst through your bonds
Like a bullet, or rather,
A vagrant ion,
Quark of divisible atoms,
Leading fission’s chain dance
Out the rare earths of your arms.

1969

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So, hello.  Next, you should know that the motto in the banner above is my new one for this eighth incarnation.  For years I’d affectionately applied it to my mother, who square-danced vigorously into her nineties, and when she passed away recently, I had to accept that I’m now the old dame.

This motto was inspired by a small book by Don Marquis called “Archy and Mehitabel” (1927), the title characters respectively a free-verse poet reborn as a cockroach and an alley cat who is Cleopatra reincarnated.  It’s adapted from a line in “mehitabel sings a song.” (Archy can’t type caps or punctuation.)

I first started dancing as a teen to the rock and roll of the mid-fifties, a rabid fan of American Bandstand with all the groovy moves.  In my early sixties debauch in Latin and Greek bars, I danced mystical rituals in Dionysian ecstasy, proclaiming:  TO DANCE IS TO REJOICE.

In young adulthood, comic-strip beagle Snoopy gave me a new motto: TO DANCE IS TO LIVE, which served well through the seventies.  In my mature partnered years in Santa Fe, dancing was rare since nightlife wasn’t part of domestic routines.  Once again a free (old) agent, in the early nineties I started dancing disco with the philosophical motto:  I DANCE, THEREFORE I AM.

Now it’s:  THERE’S DANCE IN THE OLD DAME YET!

For some years I’ve been going to the Rouge Cat and hoping my favorite DJ Oona’s “spinning.”  For many years she did Trash Disco on Wednesday nights in various clubs, and I merrily did my thing wherever she reigned.  Now she only does Saturdays and plays the good trashy stuff early on, switching at prime time to the contemporary style of music.  (It sounds like a pile-driver on speed.  Small wonder the young folks can’t seem to find a rhythm to dance to.)

Consequently, I sometimes resort to dancing to CDs at home in the hall, but I miss the synergy of the dance floor (and the volume).  Curiously, there are some great dance rhythms in classical music, but a Beethoven symphony is exhausting for an old dame.

HIGHLIGHTS IN MY DANCING HISTORY

In high school in Arkansas, I appeared on the local television station’s teen hop.  Somebody took several of us, including my sister Judy, to Texarkana to KCMC-TV.  I was thrilled to dance in front of TV cameras just like the kids on Bandstand but didn’t feel any different for being televised.  I now find a smug comfort thinking that those images of me rock and rolling are still radiating out through the universe, by now maybe approaching Alpha Centauri.

You wouldn’t think that in three years of almost nightly debauched dancing in New Orleans, I’d be able to pick out a highlight.  But I can—it shines in my memory like a baroque altarpiece.  Must have been Mardi Gras of 1962 when I went as a Cossack (actually the Russian poet Sergey Yesenin, husband of Isadora Duncan).  At the end of the Third Room of La Casa de los Marinos, I danced transcendent cumbias and merengues on top of the roaring rainbow Wurlitzer with a beautiful Mexican boy in full mariachi finery—against a wall of swirling, dreamlike murals.  Maybe I glorify it a bit, but that night was a joy one doesn’t experience twice.

After some years of marital immobility, in 1969 I suddenly found myself briefly alone and on the town in Washington DC.  In a basement gay bar called Lou’s Hideaway right on Pennsylvania Avenue, next-door neighbors with the new FBI building and the National Archives, I danced with an exquisite Latino boy called Bolo to “The Age of Aquarius” and forgot all about being a married man.  Again an unrepeatable joy.  Let the sun shine in!

About a quarter-century later, after sublimating my dance first in running and then in working out at the gym, I met some young guys who took me on a trip to Key West.  We went to a big gay bar—not the Monster, but which one I can’t recall—and I had an epiphany.  To my utter amazement I found it now completely comme il faut to dance all by oneself.  That night I danced up a seriously memorable storm of jubilation, and I’ve ridden its winds ever since.

Another night like no other was in 1997 after my younger daughter Aimée’s wedding when the party moved to the Drama Club on Guadalupe Street, then the hot gay spot in town, and made a splash in our gowns and tuxedos.  The father of the bride danced solo on one stand, his nephew up on another with a drag queen named Gina, and his mother up on the stage with an older lesbian lady, while bride and groom and other family members kept lower profiles on the floor.  Too bad no one took pictures!

Just one more.  It was early on in this new millennium when the Paramount was still open, (its site now obliterated by the Santa Fe County Courthouse).  For maybe six years it was the most fabulous dance bar with incredible Trash Disco on Wednesdays and wild weekends.  Once I found myself more or less dancing with an attractive blond guy who never even looked at me, but his moves were finely in tune with mine, an exquisite communication.  After a while I looked at him more closely, appreciatively, and recognized Leonardo DiCaprio—who danced away into the crowd without look or word.  Silly as it sounds, I felt blessed.