On
the
night in
question, she
and her mask and a
friend went out to a fine tapas
dinner and then on to a flamenco concert, the
first outing of its kind in over two years on account of the current plague which has
sundered friends, families, the commons, and the polity so that we are confused, flailing about to find some semblance of our former lives
trying to make sense of and navigate this current world while the media feed us good advice, platitudes, and massively deceptive disinformation all of which contribute to a great sense of unreality
while we try to recast our futures to include pleasures, scaled down, but good times nevertheless , like going to a restaurant for dinner before going to a concert, one the other or both, more than once every biennium, occasions that lift our spirits, that remind us what pleasures we hold in our hearts: company good food, the amazing music
of two electric guitarists and three percussionists. Flamenco frenzy as sound waves traveled across the stage, down the floor, up legs, rumbling deep into our viscera. We danced in our seats, raucously clapping our hands above our heads until the beat of the drums overcame reticence and most of the audience rose to our feet in order to really move with the groove. If the people behind were disturbed by this action they soon got up and danced too, with frantically moving arms and the people behind and the people behind and the people behind kept rising from their seats
until the whole auditorium was waving and shaking to the rhythm of a non-traditional fusion flamenco. Guitarists moving their hands and fingers so quickly that all we could see were blurs up and down the guitar necks sending out blasts of energy, and one of the percussionists playing his violin upside down, another thumping on
the cajon with one hand while the other riffed on the bongos that leaned up against the box. The bass player from Portugal was the cause of the visceral rumbling that kept building and building until our bodies exploded
from the joy of being part of a crowd, all of us sharing the same sublime experience as sounds swirled around and through us coursing through
our veins, and out our fingers increasing the vibes to that fever pitch of pure, utter
satiation finally leaving us spent and drained
with feelings of our world brought back
to a semblance of
the normal
we once
lived,
loved.
