Wednesday, June 3, 2009

ramblers

Olympia got free tickets to a show at the Old Town School of Folk Music last Friday night, so I canceled my plans for the evening to join her. We've been playing some bluegrass/country/folk music together, and I was eager to have the chance to watch some live music of that genre with her. We have similarly analytical and curious approaches to music and performance; we both want to improve ourselves by imitating the successes of others.

Seats were assigned at this venue, an auditorium that was a mix of lecture hall seating (church pews on terraced levels on a ground floor and a mezzanine) and cabaret lounge-style tables and chairs ringing the back rows. Olympia and I were seated at a table at which a man and woman were already sitting.

Since it is awkward to share a table but not conversation with strangers, I introduced myself to both of them, and there were then introductions around the table. The woman's name registered as "Pamela," but I instantly forgot the man's name. They were kind-faced older white people, heavy-bottomed with age but not unhealthy, and unassumingly dressed. The man's silver hair was short in the front but a pulled into ponytail with rubber band in the back. He had an earring shaped like a feather in one ear. They spoke to each other quietly and occasionally. They seemed moderate in every way, and very predictable for a sit down $25-per-head concert at a revered folk music institution. I say this without intending to be snide; folk is folk.

Before the concert started, the four of us chatted briefly. They wanted to know, do we like Cajun and western swing music? Even though I had gone through a zydeco craze in 1995, I threw up my hands and said, I don't know, we got the concert tickets free. Pamela said that western swing was like swing music, except with a country influence.

The lights came down and the musicians began playing. They were introduced by an older staff member as "young faces in Cajun music," but they still looked quite old to me. The youngest member seemed to be in his early thirties, the oldest in his fifties. Their arrangement was two fiddles, a hollow body electric guitar, upright bass, spare drumset; one fiddler and the bassist and guitars also doubled as singers. Their music was mostly uptempo, danceable harmonious country with jazzy walking basslines. There had been a Cajun dancing lesson immediately before the show, and just before the stage was a cleared out area for dancing, so quickly the floor filled with folks trotting around in pairs.

At the intermission, the woman sitting at the table went to fetch a drink. The man spoke to me and Olympia. I take it you guys are musicians? he said. I said, How did you know? I guess Olympia had been talking throughout the first set about the arrangements and the idiosyncratic characteristics of the genre. The man said that he was an art teacher at a local college, and that he sometimes used music to connect his students to the art. He was interested in knowing what Olympia thought of the fiddlers, and Olympia described the process of translating her classical skills on the instrument to the loose improvisation required for folk music. She talked about learning licks from a book.

The man said, There was this classically trained violinist who took his instrument down to Texas. You know, down there they say, it's not a violin, what you have there is called a fiddle!

The woman came back and we all talked about how it would be fun to dance. The man and Olympia were reluctant; the woman and I were eager. After the music started up again, couples again took to the floor to spin, twirl, and step on themselves. I looked at Olympia and suggested we dance. She demurred. The woman looked at the man and suggested they dance. He demurred. The woman and I looked at each other, and I said, Wanna dance? She said, Sure! and we took to the floor.

I cannot dance, let alone Cajun dance. I am not gifted with grace or natural athleticism. What God has given me is a below-average sense of shame. So the woman and I had a great time flouncing about on the dance floor, mimicking the moves of the more skillful dancers, spinning each other. I took the man's position and gripped her waist with my right hand and her hard, dry palm with my left.

We were both somewhat embarrassed (but not enough to stop dancing), and we chatted nervously as we moved about. At this point, there were only a few people on the dance floor and two hundred people outside the fishbowl staring at us. Because the dancers up until that point had been exclusively white male-female couples, I feared gay panic and tried to project with my body language and laughter that Pamela and I were not a May-December heteroracial homosexual pair, but just new friends out for a trot. Pamela corrected me when I addressed her: "I'm Paulina!"

We danced like this for two songs. I tried not to allow her body too close to mine, because I am friendly with strangers but I don't like to allow too much sensation to pass between me and them. Only aural, maybe some visual. Still I could feel her hard hands and smell the bouquet of her mingled, muted floral scents, and it made me the slightest uncomfortable. After two songs, we returned to our tables to fetch our intended dancing partners.

Olympia and I danced for about thirty to forty-five minutes up near the stage, trying to see the action closer. Between our clumsy dance steps, Olympia would periodically announce things like "They are using pedals on the fiddles" and "We need a spare drumset. I should buy a snare drum." It was even more nerve-wracking to be part of a May-May homoracial homosexual pair in a sea of uncomplected couples with mismatching genitalia - but only my own self-consciousness, not anyone else's judgment, made me feel this way. Anyway, by this point there were little girls dancing around in rings and middle-aged women slow dancing and other outlier groupings to make one feel less alien.

When the encore was completed, Olympia and I found Paulina and her man, and we all said, Goodbye, what wonderful table-sharing friends you were! Then Olympia and I found our bikes and rode a bumpy and dark three miles back to Cleaver Street. Last night we composed a mariachi song, but I would not be surprised if we move soon to western swing.

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