COFFEE SHOP FRIENDS

        andrea galvani, balloons

         

It was another good day to drive. The trip I wrote about in LOST IN AN EXURBAN SUBDIVISION last week turned out to be in vain anyway. The Sunday I was to be there was this Sunday, not last Sunday. The friends I went to see were in Minneapolis last Sunday. The gathering was a bunch of friends who hang at Selma's Backwoods Bean Coffee Shop. I always enjoy being among these people, at the coffee shop and at the parties that are springing up now among the people who go there. Today I knew where the house was and how to get there. Had a good learning last week. It's a nice place for a subdivision. Somebody made a big bundle of money selling the lots. The road is not state maintained. In places it is awfully steep, the kind of steep that when you start down the hill you feel alarm right away if you go at it like a regular downhill grade, because there are a few places it's like going over the top of the first hill on a rollercoaster and starting down that first slope that looks like it's straight down.



I feel like I'm in a new phase of the life, which I already know, entering a new 7-year cycle starting a couple years ago. It's like the coffee shop is the hub of my social world now. It's not like I've ever had a social world besides just the people I know. And that's what it amounts to at the coffee shop. Some of my friends there are people I've known several years, an awful lot of years, about 30 years in one case, and some just a few years and some since going to the coffee shop. I think we all feel like we've found the people in the county we resonate with like tuning forks. We tend to be people who like to know individual other people well instead a lot of people superficially. I've an idea this trend for knowing a lot of people superficially led to such social phenomena as political correctness, a Roberts Rules of Order for social intercourse with people you don't know and will never know. We sit on the stools at the bar talking with animation, sometimes much animation---meaning motion not agitation.



It's becoming a very beautiful social energy happening in there. First Cuban Celebration party the Cubans were on one side and the Anglos on the other. We chatted some, and the Anglos watched the Cubans dance, hypnotized by the beauty and the music of it. We didn't know each other. By the end of that night we were acquainted. This Friday night's Cuban Celebration was much freer in interchanges between Cubans and Anglos. Much conversational and even dancing interactions. The Cubans and the Anglos flowed freely together. We, the Anglos, are learning that just because they talk English with an accent, they can still understand spoken English. We really can talk with each other. We have a doctor in town who went to medical school and became a doctor in Columbia. The degree did not transfer to USA, so now she has a doctorate degree in Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and is practicing in Sparta. Dr Sandra Mora-Viera can make castanets sing. Her husband, Dr Pablo deVincenzo, plays accordion like a professional showman you'd see in LA or New York.



At their website: http://www.traditionalacupunctureservices.com/, you can see their pictures and read of all their degrees and medical experience. They have brought a new mind for medicine to Sparta. It's called holistic what they do, meaning the whole, takes in everything, works with the relationship between spirit, mind and body. What they do is not simplistic. Almost makes me wish I had something wrong so I could utilize their services. I'd guess it would be a very educational experience in important ways, and surely healing. Both of them have a healing energy about them. They are part of the life at the Cuban parties. Dr Pablo's accordion blows everybody's minds that an accordion can sound so good. Our Anglo association with the accordion is Lawrence Welk. I feel like I've found what it is about what he's doing that makes it so special, he plays music. He plays music that makes you move, makes dancers dance. Like Jr Maxwell said of making mountain music, if th'aint no music in it, it aint nothin. Pablo playing the music is definitely something. It's not "the accordion" any more when he makes the music flow. It's like: Wow, he can make an accordion do that? The two times I've heard him play I listened in awe. And then Sandra gets to crankin up the castanets when she's feeling it and they take us closer to the equator.



Selma and I spoke today of noticing the Anglos and the Latins interacting more the second go round. Becoming acquainted is important and it's happening. I can't call them Cubans, really, given that Sandra is from Columbia and Pablo from Venezuela and Italy. And Selma was talking today of how she's learned that all Spanish speaking people here are Mexicans. Doesn't matter if they're from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, they're Mexicans. She's given up explaining she's not Mexican and consents to it. It's the mountain form of brevity. Like if it flies and stings, it's a bee. Wasp, hornet, yellow jacket, bumble bee, honey bee; they're all bees. Everybody from south of the border is a Mexican. I told Selma I believe there is at least one Mexican in the county who plays guitar. I suspect there are several Mexican musicians here. We were both thinking it would be fun to bring them into the wine-tasting parties. We're all about inclusion. Have a Mexican Celebration. Chile today, hot tamale.



This afternoon we stood around eating finger food JoEllen prepared that was from another league delicious. She is wife of Todd Smith, new holistic chiropractor here on Main St across from the new county office building. They are healthy people. I feel like a trashbag full of water that sits down about like Jabba the Hutt and spreads out like a water balloon. They're trim and sharp and pay attention to their own health in such a way it's ongoing and keeps them in good shape. I'd take it from that his chiropractic work is valid. Our other chiropractor, Klingensmith, is another example of good health, somebody who pays attention. Todd has only been here several months. He and JoEllen came here from Winston-Salem. We of the gathering this afternoon were all here from other places. We're people who respect each other and are becoming friends as time passes and we dance together more. It's a beautiful energy generating on Main St across from the courthouse. I won't go so far as to say it's a new Sparta. It's not that. It's a new experience in Sparta.  

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CUBAN NIGHT AT THE SPARTA COFFEE SHOP

      dr & mrs jose arocha

Another Cuban night at Selma's Backwoods Bean Coffee Shop, Main St., Sparta. http://spartacoffeeshop.com/. I think everyone I talked with last night who has been in the county awhile said, "It's hard to believe this is happening in Sparta." By this, the meaning was the openly happy, friendly atmosphere in the place, Cubans and Anglos partying together, getting acquainted, becoming friends. The dance of the night was Dr Arocha and his wife. After much of the evening had gone by, someone called for the Arochas to dance. He was ready and she didn't want to. He talked to her just right and she consented. I'd taken the camera along and had not yet taken any pictures. When they started, I got out the camera. I'd kicked myself since the last Cuban party at Selma's where I failed to get any photos of the dancing Arochas. So this time, those were the only pictures I got. These pictures tell the party fairly well, the Latin flavor of the music in the dancing.

I was remembering the movie title, White Men Can't Jump, looking at the dancers thinking, Anglos can't dance. Except mountain country people, hillbillies. They can dance for sure. The rest of us stand around and shake and move feet as an assist to stay in motion. Cubans were dancing, Anglos standing around with wine glasses in hands, watching in awe. We were all in awe of what the Cubans were doing with dance. A woman in her 80s did some dancing that was dance, not just the motions. Lisa deMilo sang her Broadway hit tunes, again around age 80, in her well-experienced stage presence and Latin attitude. Lisa's husband, Johnny Violin, played some tunes on his violin. This man commanded an orchestra of violins in Miami for much of his adult life. Both he and Lisa have a lifetime of stage experience. She has a stage presence that I found remarkable. When she had something to say and wanted everyone to listen, like an announcement or introducing a song, she immediately got everyone's attention and all went silent. I was thinking, if I'd tried that, they'd have talked all the louder.

My neighbor, Allan, danced with Selma and I had to laugh. He grew up on disco, and seeing him attempt to incorporate Selma's moves and make them work as dance was amusing to say the very least. I say I had to laugh, because he was brave enough to look awkward in front of everybody, and the transition from disco to Cuban dancing was simply comic. I was also thinking, of all the people here who would like to learn to dance Cuban style, Allan would be the first and in the end the best. Because he's brave enough to jump in, plus, he loves dance. He could even learn to do the dancing with the Latin braggadocio that looks like the castanets are popping and the heels clicking. I couldn't help but think about our cultures, Anglo and Latin, both new world cultures. Anglos came from English culture transported across the ocean and changed until it can be called American culture. The Cubans came from Spanish culture around the same time, transported across the ocean and changed to become Cuban culture. Spain is their mother culture like England is ours. 

Perhaps the saving grace of the coffee shop is that Selma is Cuban. It keeps the "right" people away. The right people who position themselves according to race and assets, whose culture amounts to showing money in their things. Like Andy Warhol said when people look at his paintings they see money. If it's price is $20,000, that's what they see. So put the money on the wall and look at the money itself. He made several silkscreens of dollar bills in multiples. The people who like to be among people who show money don't come into Selma's a second time, because the atmosphere in the coffee shop has nothing to do with money. People who read books go in there. Artists tend to go there. People who have interests besides money and watching tv are there. A conversation with someone in Selma's place is most often about something, talking about a subject. It may be nothing big deal, but usually not about what somebody else is driving or wearing, unless it stands out, like the guy at the party last night dressed as Tarzan. He was a good Tarzan too. 

In about as many ways as it can be thought about, it still seems odd to have so many Cubans in the county. They don't just live at Little Cuba in Piney Creek. They're all over the county. We have three Cuban doctors. The administrator at the hospital is Cuban. At Selma's is where the people go who are ok with that vastly overused word, diversity. Initally, diversity was what American individualism was about, but it got lost in the conformity that went with the abundance of machines, making everything exactly alike, like some people think we're supposed to be, products. I used to think that way, probably still have some loose ends of it mixed in with all the other, because I was trained that way by school, church, tv and home. By this time in the life, after half my life in the mountains where individualism continues, I've allowed myself to be who I am, even when it's not acceptable. I won't say I go so far as to be objectionable, because I'm not about being objectionable either.

I don't know if it's just the people I see, the people karmically connected loosely, or if it's a legitimate pie slice, but I've found that just about everybody wants to be nice, liked, friendly, useful, good. The people we call bad, maybe 1/100th or less of the prison population, are made that way by experience when they're young. Experience this life or experience in a previous lifetime that went to the soul. People I know who have a name for being bad, I don't find bad at all. One I know who spent 15 years in hard prison, his neighbor across the road says he's the best neighbor she's ever had. All I see is people maybe a little slow in figuring they can do something illegal and get away with it, thereby getting a record: Bad. I despise it that the people I know who have been in prison automatically feel like I look down on them for it, when the fact is, I respect them and look up to them for what they've been through. Our penal system is cruel. Not as cruel as in Myanmar and India, maybe. Comparison does not justify the cruelty. But the American people have to change before the penal system can change. The so-called Christians certainly are not doing them any good. In Texas they cheered Perry, evangelist and presidential wannabe, bragging about killing 200+ prisoners with death sentences, no concern that some of them might have been innocent or the sentences draconian.

This could be a subject of conversation at the bar in the coffee shop. The conversations go according to the individuals involved. Like Dudley and I can go just about anywhere conversationally. He can't handle mountain music in any shape nor form and I don't require him to. I can't handle choral music and he doesn't expect it of me. This is what I've found among the mountain people I've known, that you can talk, be friends or acquaintances or first time talking and you don't have to agree. Mountain people know that we are all individual, unique, one of a kind, the only one ever. Everybody has their own thoughts on a given matter. I don't get it so much that people from Away understand that. They tend to have a neon sign on the forehead flashing: Approval, Approval. You don't get that from mountain people at all. You don't like it that his tshirt says, White Tail Hunter, well FU, look the other way. You gonna kick my ass about it, let's go. The suburban middle-class way is to avoid, bypass, dance around confrontation, speak in terms of political correctness that carry denotation without connotation. Handy words, like penis and vagina that children are allowed to say. The people in Selma's who are from here and from Away tend to be people who appreciate the individuals we all are, even enjoy it like the different colors of personalities that make a work of art. Again, last night I heard it said several times, "It's hard to believe this is happening in Sparta." It happens every day in Sparta.

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CUBAN CELEBRATION AT SELMA'S

johnny violin introduces lisa de milo at the cuban celebration

lisa de milo y piney creek

ruben sings of his love

pablo de vincenzo on accordion, his wife sandra with castanets

selma at home

pablo, sandra and selma

lisa de milo, pablo and the back of dr arocha's head

like a dance moment in Carlos Saura's Carmen

Selma's wine-tasting event this month, the last Friday of the month, was Cuban Celebration night. Cuban finger-food spread out on the table, all of it amazingly delicious, the quality of the cooking a treat to the palate. The wine was good, of course. This time, Latin American wines. Good vibrations throughout the party. much dancing to Latin rhythms. Lisa de Milo who started off the night singing was more wonderful than I imagined her to be. I imagined pretty good, given her history with the big bands of what we think of now as Las Vegas music, Frank Sinatra, his league all over the country, all over the world, with her husband Johnny Violin. She sings a good song in English, New York New York, and some beautiful Latin songs in Spanish. She has a good command of the floor when she's on. I've an idea that along her way she has wowed many an audience.

It was a mild form of excitement to have some Cuban musical energy generating in the crosshairs of downtown Sparta. Good Cuban music flowed out the screen door into the open windows of cars stopped at the red light. It's a sensuous, flowing music everyone can dance to, from old to young. All are the same age dancing to Cuban music. It's not like kids jerking around laughing at the old people who hold hands when they jitterbug. One looks at the other and laughs with derision at them for knowing nothing about fashion. On the dance floor at Selma's, the Cubans were showing the anglo Americans that we who call ourselves white can't dance at all. Everybody Cuban in the place was dancing at one time or another in their own ways. Selma got to flowing with the rhythms when her work was done and she was free to join the party. She is not afraid to dance. She's another wide-open woman, uninhibited with her feminine. Like I said of Ashley a couple days ago, I can say of Selma too, that she'd be a good model for a painting of Goddess. That's the kind of feminine energy I see with her.

By Goddess, I mean a full woman. Her feminine grace is her own. 

I'd known Johnny Violin and Lisa de Milo for some years, mostly on the telephone or a chance meeting in the library. He called me one day asking something about a fiddle shop in Galax, wanting to know how to get there and what it is. We talked for quite awhile. He told me his life as a violin player with orchestras that played for Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, the whole list of singers of that generation of urban music that was pushed aside by rock n roll in the mid 50s along with bluegrass and everything else. None of those musics that rock n roll eliminated died out completely. It seems like now rock n roll is dying out. It's an inclusive music and by now, after half a century, it is an open field with every kind of music being played on the charts. I can't help but think something new is getting ready to move in to fill the gap when rock n roll has become so thin that a lot of people are losing interest and turning to full-bodied acoustic music. There is an awful lot of good musicianship in rock n roll, and certainly dynamic presence. It seems like the wheel of fashion is turning, bringing something up as rock n roll is fading down. I'm suspecting the musics that rock pushed aside are coming back, like bluegrass, big-band, regional kinds of music, like polkas in Michigan, Bob Wills music in Texas.

With gas prices prohibiting going out to corporate entertainment, as it gets more and more expensive to go to a concert of about anything but local music, I'm thinking a lot of people will return to supporting local music. Maybe. That's one possibility of many. Whatever. The music at Selma's came from the people there. Lisa sang, Ruben sang. The accordion player's name is Pablo de Vincenzo. His name is Italian. His papa was Italian and his mama Venezuelan. He was something spectacular on the accordion. He can make you appreciate the instrument like never before. The woman dancing to his music is his wife, Sandra. She was a beautiful woman and a good dancer. She brought to mind women in Carlos Saura's films. Saura is Spanish. I was tripping on Latin culture, how open like family they are with each other out partying, when they see each other. Anglo culture doesn't permit touching except for sex, and dancing is something anglo Americans used to do. When auditorium rock came along, anglo culture quit dancing and sat down at concerts. When anglo's do dance, there's no dance to it, jumping up and down in place for the kids, uncertain, awkward footsteps for the adults. Watching Dr Joe Arocha and his wife dancing was some smooth Latin dancing you'd see on a dance floor at a Cuban dance club.

I was an old stump sitting on a chair or stool the whole time, taking pictures. The other anglo guys avoided the dance area like I did. I'm a boring old white turd. We call ourselves white, but we're really pink. Or is that too much like a pig? As it's been all my life, the fun I have at things like this or anything else is my own enjoyment inside myself. I've always been one to have my fun alone, like going to a movie or a concert. I despise going to a movie with somebody who gripes about it when it's over. Or gripes about whatever's not right about a concert, like, 'I wish everybody didn't stand up all the time! I couldn't see anything sitting down!' That particular concert, Golden Earring, 1976, Charleston, SC, was a great concert from the beginning that put everybody on their feet, and the band kept everybody on their feet throughout the concert, except, of course, for my date, who wanted to sit down. Go ahead and sit down. On my right a 14 year old girl was screaming her guts out, jumping up and down all the time. I said to myself, 'I'm with her.' This is what I mean by boring anglo (white) folks of the English heritage that inhibits sensuous movement. It has inhibited us til we don't dance anymore, as a rule. The Cuban dancers flowed freely with the music, the movements of sensuous Latin dance. Compared to anglo stick-figure dancing, the Cuban dancers flowed like rapidly changing clouds.  

Cuba libre seemed to me the atmosphere of the evening. I was seeing in the Cuban people their allegiance to Cuba before and after Castro. I might have got my first understanding tonight of how the Cuban exiles think of Cuba as it is now. I think if I were to leave my country to be an ex-pat in some place like Finland after the Republican Party overthrew our government with the help of the Supreme Court and set up the police state, I'd feel similar bitterness toward the police state that has run the American Constitution through the shredder and put a complete end to American liberties. We'll have the right to watch television, though what we watch will be monitored. I can't help but think the Democracy experiment in America only lasted 2 centuries. The cancer of self-destruction started growing inside and by now is on the verge of imploding the government by methodical intent from the inside. It's especially fervent now with a get-the-nigger zeal. These were my thoughts spending the evening among Cubans who have been here so long they're now as American as any anglo present. Good vibration, good energy in the people throughout the whole party. Nobody got mad. Nobody started a fight. Nobody cussed anybody out. The place flowed with Selma energy from opening to closing. 

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