A naming story.

So I met a college friend of my one lawyer friend from Missouri.

Her fiance's name is Danny, and his older brother is Daniel.

"What?", I was like.

It turns out that her fiance's mom is a warbride from the Far East and slightly off-kilter, and when she had her second son, she asked her first son what she should name him.

"Dan!", he was like.

"No, silly," she was like, "That's your name."

"Danny!", he was like.

So, she named her second son that.

A (Polish) bar.

So the other week before meeting a friend for a drink I left a little early to catch a drink someplace else early, and I ended up going to a (Polish) bar in a neighborhood that has a vestigial Polish population (i.e. they left for further out where real estate prices were cheaper)...

(I knew it was Polish from the "Zywiec" beer sign outfront.)

Anyhow, so I go in, and there's a few (white) hipsters sitting on the stools, and this older (white) lady with a very glossy face, and when I sit down, I'm sniffling like no other, like I had been all day, and I start asking her if there's a cold going around, or if it's allergies, and she (in accented English) starts telling me that it's allergies, everyone's been coming in with them.

So, we start talking about that, and I start telling her about neti pots, which she had never heard of, and she started saying that there's a lot of (Polish) natural healing stores that have medicines from India, Korea, and Japan.

We talked some more, and I told her I was (half Polish), and I started asking her about her immigration story.

It turns out that her grandparents had been in the U.S. and her dad was born here, but then they decided to move back to Poland before WWII, and so her dad grew up there as a U.S. citizen, and thus was able to take all his kids under the age of 18 back to the U.S. in the 1970s no problem.

At that point, I introduced myself, and she held out her hand and said her name, which is the same as the name of the bar (minus the apostrophe).

She also said that there's been no young (Polish) people in the city like there used to be, ever since Poland joined the EU; because of that, a lot of students get siphoned off to the UK, and a lot of the construction workers get siphoned off to Austria and Italy. She said things might change if the U.S. economy picks up, but anyone who comes here now usually goes back after a few months because there's just not enough work here, comparatively.

Soul Train events (2 of 2): Concert.

The free anniversary concert the next day downtown was a mixed bag.

I ran into some (white) people I knew (my friend I had originally planned to go with cancelled because her dog was sick), and then ran to a nearby 7-11 to get some wine to share with everyone, and then made some friends asking everyone around for a cork screw.

"Nope," the (middle-aged) (black) woman sitting in a chair behind us was like, "No corkscrew, I got my chardonnay right here!", and she held up and tapped an empty pop bottle full of yellowish clear liquid.

So, I went looking among picnic groups, and some (older) (black) women who didn't have a corkscrew but wished me luck laughed when I was like, "Doesn't it just tick you off, all that happiness closed up in this bottle and it can't get out?!?!"

A few acts in, they announced that it was one of the biggest turnouts in the spaces (almost 20,000 people), and it was like a fun packed dancer party at 1st...

"Why did you bring a chair when you're not sitting in it?", I said to the (black) woman behind me and her friends.

Like 2/3 of the way through the concert, they had to kill time between act set-up and the talking went on forever (at least 15min.), and the crowd started dispersing.

The best acts were early on, too! What a weird shape to the night.

Soul Train events (1 of 2): Doc.

So the other weekend I went to a (sold out!) screening of a documentary about "Soul Train" where Don Cornelius appeared afterward:

1) As this tall young (black) guy with artful dreads and a leather jacket walked by, the ticket-taker was like, "That's his son!"

2) Before the film started, this one skinny (light-skinned black) woman in a baseball caps and athletic suit was chit-chatting to everyone in seats on every side of her - when I sat down she was talking about how the first time she heard Donna Summer (Summers?) sing "Love to Love Ya Baby" it just bowled her over - and then she was saying how nice it was to see such a diverse audience, "'cause that makes you see that Soul Train wasn't just a black thing, it was an *everyone* thing."

So, I slid forward and was like, "Sorry, I couldn't help overhearing you..." and then told her about my one (Puerto Rican) friend with (Indian) parents who got hooked on good music through watching Soul Train as a kid.

"Even today," I was like, "When he hears a song, he'll say a lot of times, 'That's nice, but it doesn't have enough butter in it.'"

"Ha!", the lady was like, "Butter! I like that, I'm gonna have to use that. You see, when he say 'butter', he really mean, 'soul'."

Then, she started talking about how she had been at the Texas State Fair and had tried deep-friend butter there, and the (white) woman next to her started talking about how at some state fair she had tried a Krispy Kreme burger, where they make up a burger but put it between 2 Krispy Kreme donuts.

3) Everyone sang and clapped to all the songs in the movie, but my favorite part was when some (black) woman behind me shouted out when a young Chaka Khan was briefly on screen, "Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, look at that waist, mmmmmmmmmmm!"

Afterwards, I turned around, and the noisy women behind me turned out to be very staid, tastefully-dress (black) women in their upper 50s.

I also liked how in the doc they said that in the 1st year of Soul Train, the local tv show order for kids was Soul Train, Speed Racer, and the 3 Stooges, and some (black) guy shouted out from the audience, "That's right!"

4) Don Cornelius was a douche to everyone.

He was talking about how he and the announcer (some local radio or tv personality) had always been smooth, "and we're both still smooth, only now you're smooth and round!"

He introduced his ex-wife as the mother of his children, but then was saying he doesn't know what she's up to or who she gets down with anymore, though she probably is getting down, and then he apologized and was like "Sorry, she's a cancer, she's always been a one-man woman."

When some local docent asked for addresses of a past place he lived in Chicago so she could include it on a Black Pride South Side tour, he just said that would take some doing, and never offered to get that info back to her later, though the announcer jumped in and named the local high school he graduated from.

When someone during Q&A asked him if he still kept up with the dancers, he got all abashed and was like, "Uh, no.... That was 1971, that was 40 years ago, that was a long time..."

He seemed to be going senile, but I think your true character starts to show through when that happens.

Met some Germans.

So I was out the other Friday and I met some friend's German coworkers and their 2 friends visiting from Bavaria.

I talked with them some, and it turned out that not only were they students, but they were also each firefighters in their "willages" near Ulm.

"Professional or volunteer?", I was like.

"Wolunteer," they were like.

So, I started asking them if they would go into burning houses and save the beautiful German families from the flames (and I spoke slowly and with simple words so they could understand me).

"Oh yes, all the time," they were like, laughing.

"Well," I was like, "What do you do with the Turkish families?"

They seemed confused at first, and then they said that they saved them too.

"Now," I was like, "If there was a dark Turkish child in a burning house, and a beautiful German child next to him, and there was a burning piece of wood falling directly towards them both, and you could only strike it one way or the other and save either the dark Turkish child or the beautiful German child, which one would you save?"

The one laughed, and was like, "The beautiful German child, of course," and he said it like he was in on the joke with me, but his joke didn't have much finesse.

If I was him, I would have said:

- the Turkish child, so no-one would accuse me of racism.

-or-

- the beautiful German child, since I could say I didn't see the dark Turkish child in all the smoke.

Europeans. Henh.

Addendum addendum.

Also also, after knowing my one friend who "hooks" for like over half a year under a kind of bad-ass hispanic name (“Andreas”), but before I knew about his “hooking”, he told me, “You know that’s not really my name, don’t you?”

I was surprised, and then he told me that he had told me that several times before, but always when I was pretty drunk, which is why I probably didn’t remember it.

(I didn’t.)

He then told me his name (a very ultra-nerdy, unattractive hispanic name that does not translate well in terms of coolness, and perhaps is not even that cool in the Central American country from which his parents come; his dad was a very low-level govt. official, and fled corruption but now is a manager of a gas station in a decrepit suburb, and has been for decades, and will likely be in that job till death), and when pressed joked that “Andreas” was his “stage name”.

I didn’t quite get that, except that maybe he used that out at clubs since his other name would be a turn-off to people? I also realized that he had gone out with friends to movies, and he had introduced himself to them under his real name, which must have confused them when I kept calling him “Andreas”.

And why did he originally introduce himself to me that way? I knew him vaguely from around school, but I can’t remember when and how he introduced himself to me.

Addendum.

I forgot -

My one friend who "hooks" also told me that he won’t meet more than one client on the same day, since there’s just something nasty about being with two guys on the same day.

He also said it gives him time to recover if they have a big cock and really pound him, “Though I’ve always had good stamina”, he was like.