Casablanca.

So, last night at the department drinking fest, I was just getting there like an hour after it started when this one second-career doctoral student who I'm friends with was just leaving, so we talked outside for like twenty minutes, and then some more people I know were going in, so we ended up dragging her back in along with everyone, and she had like three or four more glasses of wine and got separted socializing from me for like an hour.

An hour later, then, I saw her and another student I know, and then the second-career doctoral student started asking about my having been in Casablanca this summer and if I found it as seedy as she did when she passed through there last year on the way to her Arabic summer program. I told her that I did, and then she was like, "Well, I should really tell you this, but...", and she leaned in towards me and my friends and started saying that Casablanca now was nothing compared to how it was thirty years ago.

"I used to be into their dancing," she was like, "and I had this Moroccan friend I would go to all the clubs with, and we would just watch and watch and watch, you could learn a lot by watching. At this one club, though, the dancer had these finger cymbals and she did the best job with them, and she was a lot more sexual than other dancers the way she danced, which really wasn't normal at all, and I started thinking who could this be and who would let their wife or daugher do this, and then I noticed that she was very slim and she had straight hips just like the Berber males do, they're very slim, and then I looked closer and realized that she was a man! And either everyone in the room knew, or they didn't know at all!"

She also said a lot of older guys would pick them up and take them around to all the clubs and buy them drinks, and one night walking back across the beach the older guy they were with stopped walking and made both her and her friend stop and asked them to be together on the beach while he watched.

"That was something," she was like, and added that she's never known quite what he wanted them to do, and then she stared off to one side a little bit, into the distance, and was like, "I was so naive back then."