Dynasty Club Bar, 5447 N. Lincoln: How sad for Fraulein Schnitzel! Here she was on holiday, sitting alone at a small table beneath the silver spheres and red, green, and yellow balloons, watching the others have fun. For days she had longed to merengue but no one would or the wrong music was playing. Overwrought, unable to chew or swallow, she thought back over her doomed journey: her wanderings near the Ungererstrasse, the nights of exclusion and abandonment in Venice while the dreaded sirocco gathered its ill force to the south.
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At Excalibur’s Thursday Latin night, the South American businessman she had met while taking the waters at Baden-Baden agreed to dance with her once but only after a great deal of suggestion on Schnitzel’s part. Ralph, another gentleman who frequents the Latin nights and is in his 80s, offered to take her on the floor but after two minutes he said, “This is impossible.”
Schnitzel rang up Francisco again who called his Aunt Monica who called a friend who found a young dancing man for Schnitzel though it was arranged that she would pay for his refreshments. Now here she was at the Dynasty Club Bar, under the balloons. Her escort had gone back to the car for her dancing pumps. Schnitzel wondered if he would ever return. Even if he did, did she really want to go on the dance floor and mince about like the others, doing small, formal steps back and forth, left and right, over and over, always in couples? Schnitzel had to admit that watching the merengue made her seasick. The salsa was even worse. She had heard once of another place to holiday, where the people dance by jumping up and down and rolling their eyes and sticking their fingers in their ears and doing whatever else they please. They say it is a mad, wild place where anyone can swagger alone, unleashed. It is called the country of rock and roll. Mick Jagger is president.
