The Trickster's Footwork
A long weekend on Edge City's Coco Bongo strip, where the cha-cha never quite ends and the bouncers still measure suits by the shoulder pad.
I spent four nights last week in the booth above the dance floor at the Coco Bongo, watching a man in a canary zoot suit try to teach the bartender a step that, by his own account, his grandmother brought up from Havana in 1937. He kept missing the count. The bartender, who had heard the story three times that hour, kept pouring.
A Borrowed Beat, A Borrowed Face
What struck me by the second night was how little of the room actually moved. The dancers were spectators. The spectators were the show — leaning on the chrome rail, half-lit by the marquee, performing the act of almost dancing. Edge City has always preferred the rehearsal to the performance. It is, in a sense, the city's whole posture: green-lit, glossy, perpetually about to cut loose.