Do you know what happens to a girl singer when she wears her guitar too long during a show, with the strap hanging down between her boobs? She gets gig-tits. I'm not kidding; that's one of several things I learned in Austin last weekend.
X and I spent four days there, from Thursday to Sunday, and it was great.
Here are the other lessons:
1. Austin has the most fun homeless people ever. On the way to Waterloo, X and I were stopped at a red light. We had all the windows down because the weather was so nice. A homeless man walked over, rotten teeth akimbo. He was holding up a piece of cardboard like a sign, only there was nothing written on it.
X asked him what was on the other side.
He flipped the cardboard over and the other side was blank too. Then he came closer, so that his head was almost in the car with us. I noticed that his sunglasses were peculiar - one lens was square, and the other round.
He grinned at and said, "The peg doesn't fit the hole."
2. If you talk to a woman of a certain age, wearing a hat, you never know what might come out of her mouth. Later that day, we went into the new Whole Foods on Lamar. After spending a rather fruity amount of time in baked goods, we stopped at the nut counter to buy some cashews. A woman next to us, in her early sixties, was waiting for some Spanish peanuts. Her head was decorated with a large black hat, festooned with pink ribbons and flowers; down below the Mason-Dixon line she had on silver sparkle hose with pink shoes. I told her that I liked her hat.
"Why thank you! I have one of these for every mood. In fact, I might change hats a few times on the way to my car! I love Whole Foods - I've been waiting forever for this place to reopen. That Charlie at Central Market is a good man, known him for years..." (We never learned who Charlie was.) "...but they don't label their food right. They don't always tell you what's in it. Here, they label everything. But the other day, I went to Central Market to buy some nuts, and they had monosodium glutamate in them! My eyes swelled shut!"
She squinted her eyes together to illustrate the effect of the MSG, and then kept going. But I couldn't listen anymore, because her dentures kept slipping slightly with each syllable and the effect was a little too much like the big bad in the Alien movies, and I was afraid she was about to suck out my brain.
3. Julie the Cruise Director does not belong at the Horseshoe Lounge on South Lamar. Our first night there, the Dark Lady took X and I to several of our favorite haunts, including Maudie's Too and the G&S Lounge, where one can enjoy many games of pool, air hockey, and plenty of local ass-crack. At about 1:00, I was ready to go so we hit the road to go back to the hotel. All the way back, the Lady tried and tried to get us to go to the Horseshoe, a place she's been telling us about for years.
I'm generally pretty game to try the occasional grim scene, despite my sometimes princessy tendencies - "This matress pad isn't thick enough! I need a white noise machine or I'll never be able to sleep! Do you hear me? Never!" - but the stories we've heard about this place had soured me. Apparently, however, the hops in Sierra Nevada Pale Ale are really effective at bucking up your courage, because by the time we'd pulled in to the San Jose, we'd agreed to give it a shot.
It actually wasn't that bad. I think the Dark Lady was a little dissapointed that all the parolees and twilight alcoholics had gone somewhere else that night, because it was like every other bar in town - a good blue-collar mix of students and regulars for the most part.
I say "for the most part" because at about 1:30 or so, this guy came in. Let me be clear - this place was not at all scary, but also it was about as far from a gay bar as it gets. Everyone is going to leave everyone else alone, as long as you play by the rules.
The rules do not include sashaying in and attempting to teach that one scary guy's girlfriend to tango.
He was something else - young, and not bad looking, but we decided he had gone off his ritalin. He acted like he knew everyone in the place. Pirouetting - literally - from table to table, drinker to drinker, he talked, smiled, and generally made an ass of himself. I wouldn't have thought twice about him at Mable Peabody's, but at the Horseshoe, it was so out of context - like Karl Rove showing up at a MoveOn.org meeting. We decided to get the hell out of there before all hell broke loose.
We also saw a lot of good music - Slobberbone, The Damnations, Old 97's, The Gourds, James McMurtry, among others. We looked at some real estate, we had a fabulous meal with one of X's cousins - it was a great time. I swear - one of these days I won't come back, and I'll have to think of a new name for this blog. Don't be surprised.
