We’d gone to a local restaurant that had a patio. We are the few that take those seats who aren’t there to use the ashtrays but I like being outside, even in the heat of a an early Texas summer. This restaurant serves a Tex-Mex fare and at least some of the time, in the evenings, there is live music. On a balmy, not quite as humid as normal, Thursday evening the two member band consisted mostly of a guitar and a synthesizer, each of them taking turns on vocals.
It would have been easy to be a bit put out at the volume the band insisted on entertaining us with. It was impossible to have a conversation. We had options. We could’ move to a different place or complained, but there was a congenial feel to the audience in attendance. And when an unusually sultry, salsa inspired song wafted across the patio, there was a dancer who captivated everyone’s attention.
She was sitting at the table nearest the duo. At first she just moved in her seat. She looked to be in her early 60’s, petite hands dangling a cigarette like an old timey movie star. Her hair was grayish brown and short. She and her husband sat on the same side of the table facing the band and he smiled a smile of memory of her as a young woman. At least that was what it looked like to me. My guess is she was a wild woman in her earlier years, a happy kind of wild,