cab·​a·​ret

please read this slowly

I write to you from the Shoebox Stage, upper level, where I am currently sipping something brown and bittersweet from a rocks glass sleeved in frost. Accompanying its clinks are the sounds of voices, their movement composing a harmony of language - I sip on their composition as I do my drink. The show is about to begin; I hope you are finding yourself, like I am, leaning in for what's next.

The lights dim, more quickly than the voices of the evening's crowd. Their conversations' after-current is astonishing; it buzzes like a horizontal line--a warm, neon orange--descending to the floor as the audience's gaze is drawn slowly, magnetically to the stage. We are all waiting for what's next.

A spotlight erupts into life, and into it steps one long leg.  It is clad in fishnets and supported by a black heel, tightly hooked as a bobby pin and flurrying in its own existence.  The leg begins to pull and stretch, a hip ebbing into the picture then receding, before a torso floats into frame. 

She is beautiful.  Her eyes are closed as she leans backwards, still finishing her first, excruciating step.  The voices in the room have silenced unanimously, but the buzz remains--shifting colors now, it hums in vibrations of blue, green, purple, gold, and silver, as palpable as a midnight tide. She has just now lifted her foot for a second step.

And now she has put it down.  I didn't notice before, but there is music playing - an andante, grieving bossa nova that rides the same lazy river as the woman, the object of the room's new and impenetrable focus. 

From behind her steps another leg. A piece of my heart breaks to see it, to experience the interruption of her presence, for she was surely experiencing the moment for which she was made. Because of this moment, she had grown and colored her hair just so; she had spent her nights in dance studios instead of discotheques; she had learned the art of patience from her own preoccupied and foregone relations. This is her infinite moment, and in comes a greedy co-producer keen to split the profits of attention.

As the new leg continues its tidal, tenuous movement into the center of the spotlight, it reveals the waistline of a dress pant, cuffed by a simple black belt. My objection softened, then melted, as their chemistry revealed itself. Above the belt was skin - a shirtless torso snaking in, also leaning backwards and carrying a pained face with closed eyes and a stubble I found curious. It was hardly a beard, rather the notable result of a few days' distance from a razorblade, but somehow it's felt as an immutable component of the performance. 

Their movement continued for what must have been thirty minutes - never tentative or abashed, but sumptuous and savored. They danced together as though it was their last night to feel earthly pleasure, to feel each other's weight before they became stars in separate constellations; as though they could stretch the night into millennia if they enjoyed it slowly enough.