Just Clap Your F***ing Hands
Keeping live music alive
What is the sound of one man clapping?
It wasn’t the sound she was hoping for.
A single set of hands makes a hollow thud, a lonely echo. The abrupt slap of my flesh interrupts the bar, like something falling apart. The other patrons turn to see if my table-for-one has collapsed. All they see is me: one man clapping, with his big stupid grin.
I don’t know her name. I’ve never seen her before. She’s wearing a hundred-year-old hat — a stiff, wide-brimmed fedora, a headpiece that belongs on Joni Mitchell. It goes well with her blue jeans and her Johnny Cash cover.
“Always be a good girl, don’t you ever play with guns.”
‘Girl’ instead of ‘boy’. It’s a subtle substitute, a drop of honey to sweeten an old recipe, and the huddle of half cut humanity misses it as they sip their carbonated poison in this cardboard cutout bar. There is but one lone bravo, that damned clapper sitting in the corner.
I’m a curiosity; an eccentric. A freak. A fool. The four women at the next table have shaped their faces into frowns. Their faces seem perpetually perturbed, like the recipients of excessive plastic surgery. Too many scalpels and you never stop scowling, but these women…
