Kicking Up Your Heels-- Adult Style
They say the heart of rock ‘n’ roll is an Angst as deep as a Palm Springs rain gauge. Why then, I asked myself, had I dragged three friends to a sardine-crowded, smoke-choked room to swoon over a movie star who cannot croon?
Maybe it was because Dennis Quaid had flashed those twinkling eyes right at me in “The Big Easy.” Maybe that’s the reason I had to find out why his voice needed dubbing in the recently completed film about rocker Jerry Lee Lewis. Or was I really just looking for an excuse to have a girls’ night out?
All day long we’d been calling each other, talking about what we were going to wear. Old songs like “Lipstick, Candy and Rubber-Soled Shoes” flashed through my mind. Oh, to be 12 again but without acne.
“So what do you wear to a nightclub?” I asked Toni. “Do you think a cocktail dress and an orchid would date me?”
“Are you kidding?” Toni said. “You wear black Spandex. You wear a bikini.”
“Do I have to wear dress-up shoes?” I asked Hilary. “Or can I actually be comfortable?”
“Look,” she said, “if Dennis can get up there and make a fool of himself for you, then you can suffer for him.”
Going out with the girls to scream at the boys. I thought of when I went with my girlfriends to see Chuck Berry--the historic night we first wore nylons and lipstick. Or breaking through the police lines to touch Elvis’ gold lame suit. Or going to hear Bobby Darin at the Chez Paree and getting “carded” and being told I could not have a pink lady. Or “going beat” and wearing black slacks and white lipstick to hear some guy play the bongos at a club called the Fickle Pickle.
Hilary wore sequins. Toni borrowed somebody’s black-and-white Spandex pants. Kristine wore a tie. Again, I was all in black. As I left the house, my daughter said, “You look like a burglar.”
We had among us a total of seven kids and 56 years of marriage. In my mind, the evening was kind of a hip Chippendales. I wondered whether Hilary would get so looped that she’d try to slip a 10 down Denny’s jeans.
When we arrived at the 436-capacity nightclub, it was filled to capacity. There were 35 guys in T-shirts and one guy in a tie, 400 women in black dresses, 200 new pairs of fishnet stockings, 150 future bunionectomies and a lot of curly hair that had just been through the crimping iron. I think it’s safe to say the drug of choice was estrogen.
During the interminable wait for the star, it was nearly impossible to get a waitress. Toni and I were starving and decided to walk back to the car to get the barbecued mini-rice cakes she always carried, a habit from years of traveling with kids.
We got back to the club just in time for the Quaidlude. We had to show the stamps on our hands. “It says: ‘Chump,’ ” quipped Toni.
Perhaps our biggest mistake was fighting our way to the front, where we were mere inches from his Quaidness. Dennis wore his torn-sleeve Boston Celtics T-shirt so you could see his buffed-up biceps. Unfortunately, we also got a privileged view of his armpits.
He pranced. He mugged. He jumped up on the piano and put his legs in the air. He got as carried away as Jerry Lee Lewis. If only he could sing or play guitar. Worse yet, up close, you began to notice the resemblance to his brother, Randy.
Perhaps the cruelest moment was when Huey Lewis got up on the stage to show Quaid how real musicians do it. Huey’s electric harmonica got unplugged. When he bent over to fix it, Toni snorted, “Huey’s even better from this angle.”
Hilary and Kristine had the wisdom to watch from 100 feet away, where a movie star should be seen and barely heard. They thought Dennis was dynamite. But then they also got to watch the guy in the tie try to pick up the woman who was having acid flashbacks.
The whole thing kind of came together for Dennis when an adoring fan, a very young blonde with Daryl Hannah legs, got so carried away that she screamed out, “I want your socks.” The sweat-soaked singer quipped back, “My socks want you.”
It was a moment pregnant with heaviness.
It was also the moment I knew I’d never be 12 again and scream at an actor. But I could listen to Toni’s sarcasm till the day I die. Gimme another night out with the girls--hold the socks.