The Blue Note, 1901 W. Armitage: It was an amazing coincidence! We had just come from a dinner party where we ate sweet-potato empanadas and fortune cookies served by an artist who is packing up all the Italian lights, votive candles, and tulle petticoats she can fit into her 1960 Buick Electra and moving to Memphis to live with a country-western singer because, only weeks before, she fell in love. Her friends are shocked by her sudden action. She claims it makes absolute sense as he is her precise counterpart–he has a 1965 Mercury Marauder and his apartment looks exactly like hers. And he invented a game called “Psycho Coffee Shop” which they will play forever, plus they can’t go on talking for four hours long distance every night. Anyway, after getting our fill of her favorite album, Herb Alpert’s Going Places, we adjourned to the newly opened late night Blue Note, which has a jazzy jukebox and a bar made of glass blocks filled with blue light. We instinctively sat down next to a blues musician of German-Mexican extraction who also happens to be packing up everything he can carry–in this case a harmonica–and moving to Krakow because he, too, has fallen in love.
