o r i g i n s :: (sketching what i see)

image by Chuck Rose : http://strugglingtopaint.blogspot.com

[ topical drift ]


THE Black and White Ball may sound like a mere soccer ball, but actually it's a big, ritzy, glitzy annual event in San Francisco. For one whole night in May, men and women can dress up in their most swank outfits, so long as it’s black or white, or black and white, to party hearty at a daisy chain of venues all within walking distance. For a fee. It’s a benefit, for the San Francisco Synphony, and it’s a carnival, for the rich (there being no middle class anymore), particularly for the younger set. There might be a hot salsa band getting down in the symphony lobby, some cool swing music noodlikng away in the City Hall rotunda, yummy yuppie catered buffet with no-host drinkies under a tent, and so on, like a five-ring circus. I went one year just to gawk. After all, it’s my job description: Writer, Seeker of Sensations.

I’m on the street, the sidewalk, rather, between the opera house and the theater where they signed the United Nations Charter (1945). Why? There’s this gigantic twenty-foot movie screen, on the lawn, facing the street. Twenty-foot tall, Ginger Rogers is doing everything Fred Astaire is doing on it, only backwards, and in high heels. And in B&W, natch. People walk by it, gawk, and move on. Hardly anyone gives it more than a moment’s glance. It’s as if someone had hung a gigantic picture in the hall of a castle, only this one happens to be a moving picture. Neat, but no reason to stop and gawk. Except me, to the right of the scrim and a young couple, on the other side of the screen, to the left. I’m watching the Fred and Ginger dance routine with one eye and them with the other. The dude is humoring his date, like a cool good-humor ice-cream man, while she’s obviously transfixed, hypnotized, dazzled, like a deer frozen in headlights. Something’s happening here. He waits. I wait.

Then, Fred and Ginger’s dance routine over, she looks at him with her jaw still hanging open, and says, with stars in her eyes: “I was named after her!! I’ve never seen her before!!!” He humors her with a charming smile, while giving her arm a little tug and they move on as Fred Astaire, in the medley of blasts from the past, proceeds to tapdance on the walls and the ceiling of his apartment.