~ Last night was the final Retro Night before the Marquee closes for renovations. I have three more nights of work and then I’ll be laid off. Unemployment, for me, will mean the possibility of going several days at a time without hearing “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder.

The club was nasty last night, full of obnoxious, unattractive drunks. Where did all the ugly people come from? It got so bad that when I saw a couple of good-looking friends of mine, I wanted to run up to them and beg them to leave before it started to rub off on them.

At one point I saw a tall, slim woman in a pair of tight jeans strutting around near the dancefloor. I thought, “Hmm, tall girl” and made a mental note to check her out.

I was standing by myself at the sound board a few minutes later. I felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear.

“Hi there, feel like dancing?”

I realized it was the tall girl. Her hair brushed across my cheek as I turned my head. She was leaning on me in a fashion that is not the North American social norm between strangers.

I leaned back to speak in her ear, and said, “Excuse me, do I know you?”

“If you don’t dance, then you don’t know me,” she said.

I stepped back and got a good look at her, and that’s when I went “OH MY GOD what’s wrong with your FACE.”

With her bad skin and her droopy drug-eyes, she looked like a war-dog in the cocaine army. What we used to call in New Brunswick, “a hard-lookin piece.”

She was slurring her speech and wanting to know if there was anywhere to go after the Marquee closed, “besides Freeman’s” (pizza place on Quinpool, open ’til 5am).

I said, “Soon as this place closes, I’m going home” and moved her hand off my waist.

Then she started doing these gyrating disco moves in front of me. I had to go stand a little ways away.

~ I wonder what all these people are going to do for the next six weeks while the Marquee Club is closed. Maybe they’ll go crawl under a rock somewhere, or else underneath a rotting log in some snowy winter forest.