This is culture

It was another smoky night of clogging at the World Famous Captain White’s Oyster Bar and Clog Palace. Someone was playing live old-time music for free-style clogging; I can’t remember who it was that night. I sat at a table near the dance floor in case I felt that old-time religion stir my feet.

From the bar, at the rear of the joint, emerged a waitress, with tattoos, of course. Her hulking form, topped with bottle-blond hair, loomed in my direction. Uh, oh. Was I going to get another tongue lashing about what bad tippers cloggers are? “Someone at the bar wants to talk to you,” she sneered.

That was even worse. Behind the dining room where the string bands played and the dancers clogged was a dimly lit bar. Stationed along the counter were a cast of characters that might have made Han Solo ill at ease. Half of them seemed to be in the later stages of alcoholism or lung cancer, or both. They eyed the cloggers suspiciously. Who wouldn’t wonder about this group of young people who danced to strange music, hooted and hollered, and frankly, dressed like geeks? Entering the bar was unavoidable, however; it was between the dance floor and the restrooms. Whenever I had to use the ladies’ room, I averted my eyes from the glances of the barflies. Once in the restroom, I averted my nose.

As the clog mogul of Washington, D.C., it fell to me to maintain if not cordial relations with the management, at least an uneasy peace. So, I followed the waitress/fullback through the doorway to the bar, past the barely legible sign that declared “NO TANK TOPS!” and over to the slender black man named John. Unlike most of the denizens, he was wearing a business suit. In his elegant accent, he expressed his enthusiasm for the dancing he had been watching from his barstool. “In Nigeria,” he said, “they say that Americans have no culture. But they are wrong! This is culture!” We talked pleasantly in the darkened barroom about clogging and old-time music, and I promised that next week I would bring an audio cassette of old-time music to take back to Africa with him. A man seated next to John at the bar nudged him and said, “you know, these are the first white people I’ve ever seen that can dance to the beat.”

(This post is an excerpt of an article from the June 1997 issue of The Daily Clog.)

Posted on May 21, 2008

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