"Even a single lamp dispells the deepest darkness." -Ghandi
From: rox@superok.com
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2011 21:20:08 -0500
Subject: Writing with Rox Weekly Prompt—Saturday Night
To: rox@superok.com
Writing with Rox
I love Saturday Night. Always have, always will. I think a lot of it has to do with the songs I heard as a kid of 1970s' LA, romanticizing the hot, hot, night at the Disco Inferno. Plus, there was Saturday Night Live (Saturday Night TV...Love Boat, Fantasy Island...) and Los Angeles itself, never dark, pulsed with the neon promise of roller skating around smoky rinks all night long or dreamy moonlit walks on the beach with surfer dudes. Then when I was nine or ten I convinced Ma and her boyfriend to take me to see Saturday Night Fever when it came out. Sure, that made me the only kid at the ten pm showing, but I was young enough to totally zone out the R parts (boring!). By then, the allure of Saturday Night took on a big city archetype, yet even away from LA, Saturday Night stole the show at Bar 717, the Saturday Night Dance where we square-danced the night away under the hippie starry skies of our No-Cal summer camp.
A certain bittersweet nostalgia overcomes me as I write this now. I did not live up to the illusion of Saturday Night so starlit by my youngkid romantic days. No part of my life ever blinked in lights. Even having a song in my name did nothing for the dream, though that's all fine and good. Of course I realize my idea of Saturday Night was manufactured by Hollywood, but it was my childhood and one can't take the real out of that. I realize no one truly lives up to love's young dream. And of course I realize my real-life celestial string of enchanted Saturday Nights, some mighty-fine dipped in wild frolic, romance of the earthiest kind, adventures long forgotten, heroic and tragic and all in between—has far surpassed it's lovestarved young dream. And yet. And yet...
When it is going on ten pm, when Jude is asleep for the night, when all the early-to-beds are tucked away for slumber, somewhere in the marrow of my young bones, I alert to the sound of Saturday Night on the prowl: car stereos cranked, the cries of youth disking out of a moonroof, the drunken drag of a high heel on sparkly sidewalk, bleach blond chortle, Mexican Radio, the screaming greens and reds of the traffic lights, and the choral anticipation of chance. This indeed may be my lucky night, my one-shot at love.
What is your Saturday Night story?
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