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Bobbie's Starlight Lounge
Rob Mariani Here in this enormous barn of a bowling- alley - turned - dance - club deep in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, I saw true romance. There was a pretty good blues band playing ‘fifties favorites and the blond wood dance floor filled up faster than a truck stop with a confirmed Elvis sighting. These are the faces of couples you never see in romantic movies: A 250-pound woman in a silver lame sheath dress who whirls like a torpedo around her 98-pound partner who wears a stiff, celery-colored suit and red felt bow tie. He controls his huge companion with just his fingertips and his eyes. He leads her like a drugged behemoth, bends her around him to the rhythm of a back beat, casts her outward and reels here back in and all the while their eyes, filled with deep smoldering passions, never leave each other. Just about every couple here is desperately out of shape by conventional glamour standards, and the incongruous match up between the rotund with the painfully skinny is as funny as a cartoon. Yet they embrace and dip as if they were Fred and Ginger, un-self-conscious, believing the music somehow hides all flaws and makes them perfect. At least in the eyes of their partner. Never have I seen so many people who seem “meant for each other.” It is an affirmation that we as a species are designed to live our lives as couples, appearances be dammed. One couple’s well into their 80’s. Each is bent and misshapen in several ways . They have been seriously slowed down by Life. They are a couple that has obviously been together for so long that they have become one. It seems to take them most of the song just to get out to the dance floor. They then lean heavily on each other as the band slips into a slow, greasy blues. Their dancing is a series of fits and starts, short lunges and quick stalls, like two people struggling against a windstorm. The man’s spine has been twisted and he seems unable to turn his head, so he stares straight forward, his feet carving some vaguely remembered pattern on the polished floor. But it is his gray-haired partner whose bravery nearly brings me to tears. What little hair she has left has been meticulously perm'ed into a thin, lacy film over her fragile, egg-shaped head. Her body seems without resilience, like a sack of sand, and as she tries to move to the music, she lurches violently, lifting her feet as if stepping into deep mud. Every step seems painful and she winces each time one foot comes down and the other comes up. But when they come together and their eyes lock, there is magic and chemistry. The music stops and their arms fall reluctantly to their sides. They sigh into each other’s eyes and, arms around each other’s waists, they limp painfully from the dance floor and disappear back into the crowd, back into their long, long life together, just as they’d once promised. |
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