UNDERGRADUATE PARTY

Last night I went to a party with undergraduates, in a absolutely dilapidated house in Little Italy. Not everyone at the party was an undergraduate—I had been taken to the party by my wonderful graduate student neighbor. But here's what the party looked like: foosball in the kitchen. Good beer, vodka, and clam dip. A very cute eighteen-year-old knocked on the bathroom door, realized it was occupied, and so went outside to vomit in the trash can. When he returned, smiling, I had to point out that he had a little schmutz on his tee shirt.

Meanwhile, in the living room, everyone was sitting on futons and watching a cable channel that I was heretofore unfamiliar with: Nick GaS. More specifically, they were watching seven-year-old reruns of Family Double Dare. You could tell the reruns were that old principally because of the prizes offered (a huge DVD player! A Nintendo 64!), and secondarily by the moms' hairstyles (the "Princess Di 1988"!). No one, to my knowledge, was stoned—they were just really enjoying watching small children climb through vats of ice cream. I will admit: their enthusiasm was contagious.

My wonderful neighbor and I stayed a little less than two hours. While I had been getting sucked into a succession of slime-based "physical challenges," the drunk teenagers in the kitchen were getting increasing rowdy, leading to a pile of gropey making-out on the kitchen floor. At this point, my neighbor fetched me from the living room and told me in no uncertain terms, "we're leaving." As we walked away from the dilapidated house, she furrowed her brow and said, "I think if they were all models and had been doing lines off the kitchen counters, that might have been acceptable behavior. But they weren't."

However, for the purposes of this blog, I did learn one piece of crucial Cleveland-related information: one of the sloppy drunk girls made me aware of the existence of the Cleveland Shuffle:



I honestly did not know that there were hip-hop line dances. Two of the sloppy drunk girls demonstrated the entire routine for me. I'm reminded of when I learned, during my very brief contact with the world of gay country-and-western bars, that there are particular line dance routines, which to the untrained eye are completely indistinguishable from any other country-and-western line dance, but which are only performed in gay country-and-western bars. Who knew? But back to Cleveland: I enjoy the knees-up-mother-brown quarter-turn, but most of all the there's-no-place-like-home heel-clicking. What could it all mean?!

È LEI!

So in the evening of the very same day when I first heard her voice, I met my singer neighbor! Actually, to be precise, that's not true, since it was well past midnight.

I arrived home from the office rather late Sunday night, not because I was working, but because it's more pleasant to work in my comfortable, well-furnished and air-conditioned office than in my muggy, largely furniture-less house filled with cardboard boxes and strewn with the crumpled newspaper that until very recently wrapped my dishes. When I got to my front door, there was a note saying "Greg(?) - Party in Apt 8. Drop by! D—" The question mark after my name indicated that we had only met once in the laundry room, and she wasn't sure of my name.

Sure enough, there was a party downstairs from me, with D— and her friends in the midst of a spirited game of Jenga. D— is an elementary school art teacher. Also there was the neighbor from apartment 2, who works at the wonderfully-named Plain Dealer. We all drank beer.

I stepped outside to do a bad thing. A thing I only do socially, I swear!. And as soon as I stepped outside, a very small woman with her very big boyfriend staggered their way up the walkway. She was barefoot, while he held her shoes. (And they were beautiful shoes—kitten heels in a jewel-tone blue and green brocade.) It became clear in out earliest exchange that she was the singer whom I had first heard about, then heard. She complained about her music theory placement. She explained her fach. She encouraged me to come up an accompany her on the piano sometime. She was very drunk.

She asked for a cigarette. I looked quizzical, her boyfriend frowned. "I haven't touched one of these things in a month! Today was my audition! I can celebrate now!" I had heard her, that morning, doing final preparations for the auditions to cast all the opera productions for the whole term. She had, it seemed, been celebrating all night. She visibly enjoyed the cigarette.

And that melody that sounded so familiar, but I just couldn't place? Somewhere between Britten and Schubert? It was "Trees on the Mountain" from Carlisle Floyd's Susannah.