Previously, we covered the fact that school's out for summer, and kids and skateboards need a place.
Big kids, no less than teens, need a place as well.
Of course, most would agree that we want to educate our kids and keep them safe in the summertime when they're not in school, not just because they're kids and deserve all of that, but because eventually they'll be grown up, making their mark on the world, greater or smaller a mark, and for better or for worse.
As for the "for better or for worse", of course there is always the next generation to be considered, and how to obtain one. Nature can generally be left to take its course, but that doesn't always happen in the way you'd expect.
"Back in the day", by which I mean as recently as the 1950s or so, the tradition was that various families would raise their kids in the same neighborhoods, frequently small towns, and often in the same churches. And as frequently, kids who had known each other for years would enter adolescence and suddenly the opposite sex was less an object of disdain and more of attraction and affection. The next thing you know, kids who were raised in the church married in the church and as time went on, their own kids and perhaps grandkids were also raised and later married in the church.
Of course, this sort of thing can go on for only so long before inbreeding occurs, so it's natural to look in another neighborhood, another town, or perhaps even another country. That was the tradition. Yet in the modern day, so many people are so mobile, traveling many times in their lives in search of higher education and/or better careers, that there are many exceptional opportunities to meet a mate who isn't your close relative, or so much from the same tribe as to amount to a close relative.
Yet though this creates great opportunity to avoid further inbreeding -- human beings are the least genetically-diverse known mammal, due to conservation of the FOXP2 gene which is essential for human language -- this high level of mobility tends to escape, to circumvent, the traditional means of establishing cultural continuity and building of community.
People have to find alternative commonalities, therefor; and to many people it's not enough to move from one town to another and rely on another local branch of the same religious system to act as matchmaker. Besides, this is the modern day, and especially many young people reject the role of religious establishment as helping to find someone interesting and exciting with whom to raise children.
Thus, alternatives to marrying that cutie from church -- or your high-school sweetheart -- have arisen and many of them are quite lucrative.
Frank Zappa was one of the best jazz composers ever, and one of the best guitarists, and he was from Baltimore.
Being from Baltimore notwithstanding, Frank Zappa was also a genuis of several orders, and never so much as when making social commentary:
Disco music makes it possible to have disco entertainment centers. Disco entertainment centers make it possible for mellow, laid-back, boring kinds of people to meet each other and reproduce.
Back in the day when Mr Zappa felt it necessary to belabor what has since become pretty obvious, I personally loathed disco, not so much for the scene although that also got to me, but because of the musical simplicity.
However, it did have a beat, and you could dance to it, which is more than can be said to a lot of the commercial rock being played at the time. And so, back in the day, I occasionally found myself in a disco, because I liked to dance. Fortunately for me, the new age of musical and rhythmic complexity was coming to be, and coming to America, mostly from places like Germany, and you could damn sure dance to that:
And then there were other things springing up from the fertile ground of disaffection with both commercial rock and the even more commercial disco scene, and you could damn sure dance to that, too:
...and frankly, I like their attitude and politics better.
Of course, the disco scene -- now as much as then -- frequently tended to promote a lot of one night stands, quite the opposite of the intentions and functions of the traditional systems for matchmaking, those of school or church.
In upscale Montgomery County, we are told that of women living in poverty, half are the heads of a household. Half of Montgomery's female poor are Single Moms (PDF), according to a County study.
From the Washington Post coverage:
It cited one statistic in particular: The median income for families living in Montgomery County in 2007 was $108,464, but the median income for families headed by single women was less than half that, $45,022.
I hate to come off as a moralist, though in fact that's what I am in this case. The only single socioeconomic predictor of a child growing up to lead a life of dysfunction and crime, that is greater than being raised in a family with no steady male presence, is poverty.
Thus, do the math and follow the logic: half of the families living in poverty in Montgomery County are at double risk of very poor outcomes.
Recently, I have been spending a fair amount of time in a local bar in Aspen Hill. Why?
Well, I assure you that I could stay at home and drink for far less than what I pay in a bar. Indeed, I could buy a six pack for what I pay for one beer in this joint, which means its prices are pretty standard for the region.
But this bar has something that I really like, something there is a severe shortage of in Montgomery County. They have live music.
For example: last night, I caught a really excellent local band, "Johnny and the Headhunters". They play a very dance-able mix of blues and bluesy rock, in a style not too different from the old Danny Gatton band -- the drummer used to play with him -- or the Nighthawks or for that matter Stevie Ray Vaughn.
Now, let me hasten to point out that the only thing wrong with this bar is me being there, an opinion probably shared by most of the staff and clientele. But hey, they're serving, I'm buying, the band is playing, and I can and do dance when the band is hot. Frequently I wind up dancing with one or more of the ladies.
How do I dance? Let's just say that I have long admired James Brown ("the hardest workin' man in show business") and back in high-school I used to watch "Soul Train" and try to learn moves. Then came Disco, and Punk Rock, and even Gothic Rock:
I suspect that if I'd been born exactly as I am, but female, I'd probably have spent a part of my life as a stripper, or some other sort of professional dancer. Such work opportunities are limited if you're male and not gay, generally speaking, but I do love to get out there and move my feet to the beat.
Of course, it probably is a little off-putting to some folks when I'm doing the Billy Idol in what more or less is becoming a biker bar. Yet there's usually one or more gal who likes that sort of dancing and is pretty good at it, too.
Ordinarily, I don't do my bar-hopping in Maryland. I got dead sick of that back in the 1980s at such places as College Park's "Rendezvous", which was the sort of place that was line-out-the-door and where after hours the staff cleaned the floor with a big squeegee and a hose rather than with mop and bucket. Such places are to be found in the District, as well, but there are also a lot of smaller bars that have established clienteles and reasonably priced drinks, and decent jukeboxes.
Montgomery County's bar scene long ago "got to me". Restaurants that also serve alcohol are one thing; you can sit down and eat and if you want some beer or wine with your haute cuisine or steak-and-potatoes, you can get that. The object of the place is to eat, and maybe drink; it's not there for the main purpose of being a meat market, as was the Rendezvous.
The thing is, if a place has a dance floor and maybe even bands, probably most of the customers -- or a high percentage anyway -- are there to "get lucky". I'm not.
Over many years of hanging out on this or that scene in the District, and elsewhere, I've wound up having the following conversation, thankfully a lot less of it in recent years than back in the day when I was young and pretty. I think I first had this conversation when I was working at "Rumors".
[After serious dancing, one must sit and drink and cool off]
Me: Hey, awesome dancing. That was fun.
Cute gal: Most fun I've had in a while.
Me: I try, plus you're easy to work with.
Gal: So, are you a professional?
Me: What, dancer? Naw...
Gal: Naw, I meant professional, like professional.
Me: Um, you mean like a yuppie? You're kidding, right?
Gal: No... what I meant was, you know, like me, "in the business".
Me: Um? In the business?
Gal: I'm in the business, upscale you know, but I have to have my own life you know, and at least you can dance.
Me: I am still not quite getting it?
Gal: Tee hee, sorry, what I meant was, I guessed that maybe you were one of the ladies' men that hang out over at Four Seasons on Thursdays. Maybe even a fellow pro.
And at last I got it.
Four Seasons is a very upscale hotel complex in Georgetown. And at the time, there was one night a week, or twice a month, I forget the details, there was generally a gathering of gals in their 40s and 50s, and if you were a younger gentleman in good shape, with good manners and decent clothes and grooming, and feeling rather friendly, there was a very good chance that some of those older gals would spend a fair amount of money letting you show each other a really good time.
These fine and fetching and much-younger ladies with whom I so frequently found myself sharing our best dancing were working the other side of that street, and evidently a lot of them thought I was a fellow professional, working the Cougar's Den, though that's not how we referred to it at the time.
My point here?
It seems that even the professionals thought I was a gigolo.
To continue that conversation, from above:
Me: Why? Why do you think that?
Gal: Well, after dancing like that with a woman, usually anyone who wasn't would be hauling ass out the door with a new friend on their arm, headed for the nearest hotel...
Me: Uh, maybe I just really like to dance?
Gal: Heh heh. Too bad for you, I was going to take you home and show you some professional courtesy.
After enough repetitions of variations on this theme, I developed a traditional German Sense of Humor, which is to say, I started drinking heavily... and mostly stopped dancing. Or going to shows. Or bars. Especially not ones with wealthy older women.
All that's left is, of course, going to see shows at bars where everyone brought their date or spouse. The bad part about that is that people all start trying to fix you up with someone. And frankly, I am too old and set in my ways to be much interested in that.
As bad as this is for me, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the single moms, especially the ones living in poverty. On the one hand, they've got a mess of responsibilities at home, raising their kids and trying to put food on the table. I, at least, can afford to go out and see a show now and then, if I miss a meal or two from overindulging, maybe I can lose a pound or two of unsightly middle-age midriff. If they aren't really careful with their money, their kids could suffer and nobody wants that.
Single moms probably need to be really careful about dating. It's arguable that a lot of single moms might not be in the situation they're in if they'd had better taste in men. Anyone can make a mistake once, but most people don't want to make that same mistake twice.
Still, what's done is done. We, as a society, need to do what we can to try to halt the double-whammy of poverty and households without a good man to act as a role model for male children. It might not be too easy to find a man for a single mom who wants to take on the heavy burden of trying to be a good father to another man's kids, but the poverty is something that we can tackle and probably with significant success if we put enough effort into this.
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