Ink drawing based on an 18th century theme, 2006
(21 x 29.7 cm)
Cover design of the wine menu
from Restaurant 1728 in Paris, France.
BY Alain Le Yaouanc
Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported License

The first priority, Larry decided, was to get everyone sloshed. The recipe he decided on came from Patrick Duffy’s Bartender’s Guide: Artillery Punch — a concoction of whiskey, red wine, rum, gin, brandy, benedictine, black tea, and orange juice. He mixed the ingredients in a borrowed aluminum tub, and one of my jobs was to make sure people kept coming back for more.

Even the superintendent of schools was drunk in half an hour, and the whole group grew so rowdy that the town’s kids gathered on the hill above to peer down on their grown-ups slurring jokes and swaying shoulders as the hilarity built throughout the night and into the morning. The next day our nine-month-old German shepherd was so hung over he couldn’t climb the steps up into the trailer. Apparently he’d been slurping leftovers from the bottoms of discarded paper cups, and had also been helped along by the postmistress, who thought it cute that Bismarck loved the punch as much as she did.

On a return visit years after we’d taped the Epitaph’s two-inch write-up into our scrapbook, we learned that our party had been the catalyst for the erasure of obscure enmities: people who (we hadn’t realized) had not spoken in years sang songs that night with their arms around each other, the kids perched on the hill serving as witnesses to the formation of miraculous truces. Just a mention of that party, and everyone began laughing, adding another anecdote to the legend of the party that, like the town itself, was “too tough to die.”

Never had I imagined entertaining could be so powerful. And even though I’d spent the evening frantically serving as chief busboy, waiter, and dishwasher, even though I’d spent the entire day cleaning the trailer, chopping potatoes and onions for gallons of potato salad and was exhausted for days afterward, during that night I had been happy.

Certainly there had been no corners — the patchy grass outside our 10 x 48 foot trailer overlooked a canyon reaching all the way to the Dragoon Mountains. And if there had been cliques, well — I was the hostess, I could interrupt them, ask if anyone needed another drink, urge people back to the table with the food, make sure everybody mixed. I didn’t have to follow anyone else’s script. Best of all, since we had no way of playing music, nobody could dance.

Outside Mrs. Drachman’s slick floors, from the radio, TV, and my girlfriends’ 45’s, another kind of dancing cast a shinier lure. Bee Bop Alula, I was nobody’s baby, but I knew that ballroom dancing was on its way out…

Maybe I still grew numb with terror at parties where dancing was expected because, at five feet nine by the sixth grade, I towered over ninety-nine percent of the boys I knew. In the fifties, it was an unwritten law that no girl could pair up with a guy she looked down on. Biologically, it had been proven, I believed, sparks would never sparkle, “chemistry” would never combust unless a boy could look out across the dance floor over the bobbing head of his date. Too bad if the guy at Rincon High I liked to talk with most — Steve Ledbetter, a whiz at math, science, and Latin and a fellow lover of Emerson — was five feet four.

At Mrs. Drachman’s Junior Assembly in Tucson, even if I slumped, I was taller than anyone in the room, including Mrs. Drachman, whose steel-corseted prow could have cleared ice floes in the North Atlantic. I spent the time between dances wishing I could disappear. Usually the last girl chosen by the shyest, smallest boy in the group, I knew I was lucky just to have a sweaty hand gingerly clinging to the gathers of my skirt. One, two, three, four, Mrs. Drachman called out like a drill master, as we plodded around the polished floor to the brisk tinkle of Mrs. Reynold’s piano. The rubber soles of my scuffed saddle shoes — the only pair among the girls’ black patent leather slippers — grew heavier, clumsier as the hour dragged on.

Outside Mrs. Drachman’s slick floors, from the radio, TV, and my girlfriends’ 45’s, another kind of dancing cast a shinier lure. Bee Bop Alula, I was nobody’s baby, but I knew that ballroom dancing was on its way out, reserved for old folks like Lawrence Welk and his chirpy Champagne Lady, Roberta Linn. Yet at home Daddy earnestly tried to reinforce Mrs. Drachman’s efforts. While Mom was doing the dinner dishes, clattering the Melmac and Revere Ware in the sink, Daddy, with no music to help us out, held me at arm’s length and led me in tight little fox-trotting circles around the living room. The most important thing any woman can learn, he preached as we trotted, is never to lean on her partner. My hand was to rest as lightly as a butterfly on his shoulder — I must never drag a man down. I must also anticipate my partner’s every move, keep my feet out of his way. My mother, he went on, had never developed either of these skills. Daddy was a fan of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. (It was decades before Ann Richards’ comment that “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”) After twenty minutes of my father’s lessons, I’d bolt into my bedroom with a book.