Dancing with Myself (Oh oh oh oh.)

Has all this protest talk been killing your buzz? Mine too. Let's talk about something fun and frivolous.

On Friday, Fosco finally made his entry into Santa Cruz nightlife--accompanied by his sexypals Julie, Liz, Aliya, and Maria. This is actually Fosco's preferred modus operandi for being "out on the town," i.e., surrounded by attractive and fasionably-dressed women. He generally believes that some of their sparkle rubs off on him...

We began the evening at the "Red Room"--the fabled Santa Cruz superlounge. And, although Fosco had heard tons of positive things about the Red Room, he still found it to exceed expectations. The Red Room is actually Santa Cruz's answer to a superclub, in a sense: a smoky and casual downstairs bar and a sophisticated lounge and restaurant upstairs. The pic at the right is the downstairs bar, as I haven't been able to find any online shots of the upstairs lounge to steal appropriate.

The lounge is extremely cool. It's dark and red and decadent with red velvet and divans and a fireplace--the atmosphere is tops. The music is excellent: not too young, not too old (what a radio station might call "the best mix of the 80s, 90s, and today"). How happy was Fosco to hear a Billy Idol double play: "Dancing with Myself" and "White Wedding"? Yessssss....

The drinks are fine and not too expensive ($5.25 Tanqueray and Tonics--not too steep). The service is to be expected in such a popular place, i.e., slow. However, our waitress was certainly friendly and, interestingly, a student of cosmetology--she will probably be coloring Liz's hair in the not-too-distant future. In addition, one of Fosco's students works there are some sort of floor manager, however, this did not translate into free drinks for Fosco (at least I don't think it did... I sort of lost count at one point...)

The most exciting thing about our conversation at the Red Room? It turns out that Liz is, like Fosco, a huge Madonna fan (well, we liked her in her pre-Malawian-baby-kidnapping phase). We even both purchased and later sold/lost Madonna's Sex book! And then "Justify My Love" came on and all hell broke loose...

After leaving the Red Room, we headed to Santa Cruz's only gay danceclub, Dakota. Dakota has a really cool space with a nice long comfortable bar in front and a relatively small dancefloor in back. The coat check drag queen/tranny is fierce. Unfortunately, the Dakota experience could have been better. For one thing, there were hardly any gay men there. When we arrived (around 11:30), it was mostly lesbians. As the night wore on, the crowd started to become mostly straight couples and then finally, around 1, the place emptied out entirely. This was odd, but I suspect it was just that the heterosexual people wanted to get back to their dorm rooms to have heterosexual sexual relations. I've been told that Saturday nights have more bois, so that's the plan next time.

In terms of music... well, Fosco has been out of the club scene for a long time, so he doesn't really know what's popular these days, but... the music was pretty bad. Sure there were high points (e.g., "Shakira, Shakira"), but there were also songs that cleared the dancefloor completely. I'm going to suggest that the Friday night DJ is not the most talented spinner in town. Oh yeah, and he played "SexyBack" twice (the second time by "request"). Is it me or did that song die after about twenty minutes? Of course, during those twenty minutes, Fosco was all over it.

Ah, the nightlife... Fosco is glad to be back.