It occurred to me that I never wrote about my last night in France before I went back to the US for Christmas. It was, as always, quite an adventure. I went out with one of my ex-pat friends for hookah. Well, that is not entirely true. We decided we wanted middle-eastern food, so we went to the first Lebanese place we saw, intending on getting baklava and mint tea. But we walked in and it was a hookah bar slash baklava restaurant. And since it was Saturday night, it was also karaoke night.
Let me interject a quick explanation of hookah here– in case you don’t know (I didn’t), a hookah is this great big thing not unlike the thing the caterpillar in Alice In Wonderland smokes, but the difference is that the caterpillar’s is filled with some kind of hallucinogenic LSD-like drug, and hookahs are only filled with what I like to think of as rabbit tobacco. I am not sure exactly what it is, but it is legal in the US so it can’t be terrible. I think they go to florists at the end of the day and just ask for all the leftover clippings and petals and stuff, and then they put that in your little pot and light it on fire and you smoke it out of this big long maté-looking straw. (Speaking of which, I would kill for some maté, but I think, like Mexican food, it hasn’t made it to this side of the ocean yet.) Anyway, it’s completely legal, and tastes like... fruit and flowers and things that are sparkly.
So we walk into this tiny [tiny] unbelievably small really ridiculously little lebanese place, only to see it is already packed, and there is some kind of lebanese music blasting out of the restaurant. Now, I go to a lot of concerts. And I spend a lot of time in restaurants and cafés in Paris. I know what loud is like. But somehow, because this place was so small and so full of people, it filled up with so much more noise than most 1000-seat concert halls do. As we opened the door, it was like the music pushed us out of the way and we had to fight past it to enter– like it wanted out more than we wanted in. So we come in and see that the place is packed, and stand there awkwardly, like a bunch of pale giants in this room full of petite middle-eastern women, so graceful in the almost-complete darkness. We are trying to be subtle and figure out a way to leave, since there is no room at the inn for us, but then the owner of the place comes over and motions us to this cushion thing with a table in front of it smaller than the trays we use in the Emory dining hall. He hands us a menu, and we quickly realize we are not getting out of there anytime soon. As my archaeology professor said, "They use those banquettes when they eat because it is so comfortable and you would want to be comfortable too, if it was going to take you four hours to eat a meal." We didn’t eat a meal, but we ordered mint tea and an apple-blossom flavored hookah, which came toute de suite. We had to sit next to each other on the cushiony seat, so we are trying to not make it too obvious that we are like bulls in a china shop, nearly knocking over our tiny table and looking out of place in the clothes we thought were so chic just a moment before.
Then the guy playing keyboard passes off the mic to some guy who starts dancing and singing "Billie Jean," by Michael Jackson, in Arabic. I wet my pants at the hilarity. Ok, not really. But I could have, since I had to not actually laugh at it out loud because it would have been so rude. Then he starts dancing. Toward our table. And I immediately busied myself looking busily away, checking the time, digging in my purse for some elusive object, and not making eye contact. He gets to the edge of our table and grabs my hand (what, do I look like I could sing Arabic backup vocals? Or maybe tambourine? Or perhaps he mistook my plain black leather belt for one of those jingly net things belly dancers wear. Either way, I was not leaving that cushion.), but by this time, every woman in the place is looking covetously at our table, because he had clearly picked us to dance with. Not wanting to incur their wrath, I further convinced myself of the badness that would be dancing with him. Every guy in the place was looking our way, probably trying to figure out what he saw in us, and I am trying to act like nothing is amiss, much the way tourists do when old men come offer to sell them roses for their sweetheart during dinner on a Paris restaurant terrace, or people on a date at a Mexican restaurant in the US when the mariachis come to serenade their table and no one knows how to handle it. And he is holding my hand with one hand, and the microphone with the other, and I am trying to act like he is just holding it as a gesture of courtesy, and not as a method of pulling me onto the... well, it wasn’t a dance floor, it was a 2-foot square area of space in front of the keyboard, the same space we had so conspicuously occupied when we walked in and found the place packed. No one has left since we arrived, and it’s been nearly an hour. "This guy has clearly underestimated my stubbornness," I am thinking to myself. "No one talks me into anything I don’t want to do, particularly when it involves me potentially making a fool of myself."
Well, that may be the grossest exaggeration I’ve ever stated in my life, and probably the biggest lie, but that’s a whole different story. I realize that this thought is a total lie as soon as it enters my head, because with the right arguments, I can be convinced to do pretty much anything that I didn’t want to risk because "I might make a fool of myself." Usually I do make a fool of myself, but it’s also usually a good story afterward.
So I have turned on the charm full-blast, and suddenly I am a genteel woman at a Mozartian ball, with a powdered wig, fanning myself with my gloved hand and leaning forward to whisper to the woman seated next to me, lending my hand graciously to a footman to kiss while not actually deigning to look at him, while the truth is I am an awkward 21-year-old who is scared to go because 1) I can’t bellydance and 2) I am so tangled in our coats, scarves, mittens, and hats that standing up means certain stumbling, and the only reason I am not making eye contact is because I am afraid he’ll start speaking in French, and then my cover is completely blown.
By this time, the stepsisters at the ball, the women who actually know how to match his dancing, have emerged from the woodwork and are coming up behind him, trying to act casual and go slowly, but obviously racing each other to see who can get there first, since he is the only man dancing. He puts my hand down, still unaware of them behind him, and stretches out his arms during a break in the song, twisting his hands in the bhangra motion known in my head as "lightbulbs," and I am thanking my guardian angel that I had enough presence of mind to abstain from this song– not only is everyone in this place watching, but there is no way I would have any idea how to dance back to that. Now the women have gotten to him, and he turns, startled, and they are clicking those little golden things on their fingers that make such lovely noises, and dancing like a cross between Shakira and Princess Jasmine, and I am incredibly jealous of their ability to do it and look so natural and so calm, despite the fact that they are belly-dancing to a Michael Jackson song from the 80's. But they have more grace than I would have had on an empty dance floor in a ballgown waltzing with a cotillion-trained tuxedo-clad yuppie. Soon the song finishes, and some other Lebanese song I have never heard is being played, but now the keyboardist is singing, and a few other men have gotten up to dance, and I accidentally make eye contact ("SHOOT, Laura! I think he saw me! DO NOT LOOK OVER THERE!") and we are beckoned to a few more times, but the belly-dancing women seem to understand our dilemma, and keep the men occupied enough that we are not asked to dance anymore.
Plus, by this time I was so comfortable, buried in the nest formed by our winter accouterments that covered our lap and the cushion itself, relaxed from the room so thick with sweet-smelling hookah smoke that it seemed hotboxed, and so calm from sitting there trying to blow smoke rings and practicing our best dragon faces while blowing smoke out our noses that I probably could not have stayed standing for an entire song– I probably would have fallen asleep standing up. "Because that is the point of the cushions, you know– you see it in all the pictures..."
She still does rock my world,
B