Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

My dog and I are on the long journey home, in the middle of a gray flurry, driving on a stretch of highway where all the buildings have been boarded up in preparation for some sort of highway project.

This ghost town reminds me of dreams I used to have of abandoned towns. Those houses seemed familiar, like places I'd once lived.

I just spent a great weekend with my sister, celebrating her birthday. On Friday night, I got to State College, and we dressed up and went out on the town. I wore a red and black miniskirt, black tights, black patent leather shoes, a red velvet vest and black velour jacket. She wore a pinstriped suit. That afternoon we had bleached streaks into her hair and touched up my roots. We looked Mod.

I had a Celine Dion song stuck in my head, the one with the refrain, "I'd drive all night to be with you." I'd accidentally seen it on Oprah while rewinding a movie. Celine Dion has a new Vegas show, and the dancers pranced in perfect, head-tripping synchronization to the pop tune. Definitely not something you want appearing in your head every time you close your eyes. I begged my sister to get my mind off it. She obliged by singing "Macavity" from CATS. I neglected to thank her.

We took a window street at the Allen Street Grill, which is a second floor bar on the corner of College and Allen in State College. From there, you can watch people walking down the street, so we played "Fashion Do's and Don'ts", critiquing the people walking by. Most of the guys have absolutely no style. It's like somebody handed them all jeans, T-shirts and a baseball hat.

Across the street on the university side, a small band of protesters have been keeping vigil since the war in Iraq broke out. They've been taking shifts, burning candles. They've hung signs on the university gate and are talking to anybody who will listen. A Penn State Security guard stood with them, his hands on his hips, not moving, for more than an hour.

Saturday night was the big dinner party at my sister's place. We spent most of the day preparing for it, and even so, some food of the food was still cooking when the first guests arrived. Although the event was "dress up optional," it was as if someone had sent out a memo requiring vintage attire. One guest wore a black 1950's taffeta evening dress; another wore a long-waisted 1920s dress with a long knotted necklace and a magenta wig. I wore a no-sleeved dress I'd picked up in a thrift shop; just above the knee, dark blue with a pointed collar, printed with tiny white and red flowers. It looked like something straight out of my mom's 1970s wardrobe.

Another guest wore a fantastic red smoking jacket and had crafted his hair into a low pompadour. He was telling anyone who would listen that Frank Sinatra was all right but Dean Martin was better: acting, singing, all around. The Dean was the man. The smoking jacket guy was also in Leisure Studies and regaled us with the theory behind leisure.

My sister's roommates got decked out: one in black pants, a vest and bow-tie, and the other in his favorite white suit. My sister herself stuck to simple, with a black top and violet miniskirt (about the color of this page).

My sister's dog, Emma, who is recovering extremely well from her accident, played doggie hostess, greeting everyone cheerfully and spending quality time with her guests, mostly getting petted. My dog, Una, was the bouncer. Whenever someone got out of line, she would stand in front of them and bark. She especially didn't approve of the wig-sharing that occurred later in the evening, when the magenta wig made its rounds. The guest who looked best in it was a thin guy in a striped shirt. Everyone said he looked like a French model. We dubbed him Dante.

We burned candles, ate a fantastic selection of food, including three varieties of homemade fruit salad (one mine), listened to some lounge music, some Gipsy Kings, some James Brown, and got down with our bad selves.

As the evening crawled along, we decided we were too fine to sit around in a room like that, so a bunch of us headed down to a new place in town called the Bar Bleu. It's the kind of place you should need a password to get in: down in the basement of a bar and grill, the kind that serves real barbecue. You know they serve the real thing, because they have rolls of paper towels on the tables.

Downstairs, the first thing you notice is the blue lights and the silver bar, lending everything an unworldly glow. Then you turn to your right, go through a little door, and there's a close-packed room, the walls painted with reproductions of Matisse.

The Andrew Jackson Soul Jazz Ensemble was hot in the swing of things. We took a table down front, ordered some cosmopolitans and some rum and cokes and sat back to enjoy. It was too loud to talk, so we made hand gestures and pretended to understand each other.

I used to come out to see Alan perform in a reggae band called The Earthtones, which was a State College legend and closed out the Arts Festival each year with a wild, three-hour celebration of music and dancing. He recognized us and came over to shake everyone's hand at our table after the show.

"It's good to see real music lovers here," he said. For our part, we thanked him for playing some Sonny Rollins.

On the way home that night, we ran across three guys wearing straw sombreros. They weaved drunkenly across the road, shouting, "USA! USA! USA!" One of them dropped his hat in the street and another said, "You dropped your sombrero, bamigo." He lurched to pick it up, and they took up the chant again: "USA! USA! USA!"

"It's like a football game," my sister said.

We heard later that a belligerent drunk hassled the protesters that night, tore down some of the signs, shouted at them, threw someone's cell phone on the ground and even hit a girl before the police arrived. By then, he'd run off.

Then this morning, we woke up to a white, white world. Nature had decided to have one more fling before spring. But it wasn't sticking to the roads, so I wasn't too concerned. My sister and I took our dogs, along with the dog of a friend of hers, to play in a nearby park. The dogs ran wildly in the snow, playing tag and eating snow. Emma, afraid that her two best friends would befriend each other and abandon her, kept getting between them and separating them.

And now here I am, on the road home, on a gray day, with a slight headache, feeling calm. Refreshed. Renewed. Like the spring snow.

Moral:
My horoscope says it all: "Confidence comes from travel, since life is a great big adventure at this point."

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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