Nashville, Tennessee
Southern girls are wild. Strip-tease, strapless, down-on-your-knees, dirty dancing wild. There's a certain kind of Southern girl -- long blonde hair, pretty, feminine, demure and polite with elders. Then they go drinking. They toss back beers and cocktails, toss their heads, and wrap their arms around young good-looking jocks. They get up on stage and dance, they dance seductively with boys, and with other girls. They display their sexuality.
A bachelorette party was under way at the Big Bang Dueling Pianos when we went in. Southern girls with pretty blonde tresses in short dresses. The one in white raised her arms, stood up to dance, bloomed in the attention of the others. You could tell she was itching to get up on the stage with the young men playing the two baby grand pianos. She sidled up to the security guard on one side of the stage, then the other. Her arm wrapped around his shoulder, her hand on his pecs, as she whispered to him. A white woman seducing a black man in the South. It was an odd sight. Americans are fed a kind of mythology of the South, of the segregated (why not call it dis-integrated?) Jim Crow years, lynchings and injustice. This woman and this man didn't make me nervous, not the way all that police presence in Memphis made me nervous, but I wondered whether there was some instinctive primeval twitch in the big burly white men in the room.
The handsome buff piano player rebuffed her attentions, but eventually, she got her way. A rap singer came on stage to sing Gold Digger by Kanye West and the blonde woman was revealed as the bachelorette, due to be married shortly. She got up on stage and mouthed the lyrics to the song, dancing with abandon, sticking her butt out in the audience and gyrating, leaning against the piano, prancing across the stage. It was the moment she had been waiting for all night, and she seized it.
The crowd was electrified. The song itself was so unlike the pop and rock that came before (and after), and to have one of their own entertaining them brought them to their feet. A young man flung dollar bills at the girl, who danced on, basking in the glow of our attention.
The song ended, she hugged the singer, the crowd burst into applause, and the evening continued, changed.
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