September 16, 2006 "Sophisticated Squaw"

09/16/2006 The Orpheum - Ybor City, FL
Other bands: Lola Ray

Wearing my new pants, which were jet black stretch denim, in the central Gulf Coast of Florida at the tail end of summer in subtropical America was a true hardship test. Before the first merchandise tub was brought in, my legs already felt wrapped in moist neoprene.

But I felt like someone else, and that was all that mattered. Life was a fundamental struggle and all things good and fashionable came with a price. Right?

The cobblestone streets of Ybor whispered back to a day when Cuban immigrants rolled the finest cigars of the 1920s for the rest of the country and ropa vieja was on every menu in town. (Well, I suppose it still is.) I'd like to think this quaint little district kept its authentic flavor through the passing down of real estate from one old world generation to the next, but it was more likely a place like Ieper Belgium, where the city had nearly mandated a sort of neighborhood association ordinance on properties in or around the city center so that they would look like the charming peasant neighborhoods of Belgium past.

I could have been wrong.

Had it actually been 1920, I might have slid comfortably into the social fabric of the time. I still had the ratty Russian motorcycle goggles and tweed vest ensemble I constructed in August. I had also added a black leather cabbie hat and black leather gloves - things, which, combined with the fog of alcohol, and whether others agreed or not, gave me an intoxicated aura of a 1969 New York underground zeitgeist via Weimar Berlin cafe society.

There was a girl at the show. She looked at me once while I was putting my goggles on my head offstage. I thought she looked strange in these environs. Too clean. Too put together, like a librarian who happened to be blessed with good skin and bone structure. She looked once in my direction and gave a vibe I received as "put off by my stink of rock."

But afterwards, she came up and introduced herself as Angelique. "Like a stripper," she said. Except she wasn't one. But she was infatuated and I had lifted personal sanctions on flirting in efforts to win over more fans. She told me she was coming to the next show in Tallahassee and I told her I hoped she would. I assumed she wouldn't.

I saw her again in the parking lot of Big Daddy's the next night, four hours away.