Clubbing in Buenos Aires

Last night my English roomates and I went to a bar called Museum. I envisioned a more stately affair, replete with butlers/curators showing off traveling disco mania exhibits and offering crustless sandwiches. I expected a coat check where they would call me madame and compliment my grandmothers silver broach that I wore tied up in my hair. I expected women in dainty white gloves and dapper gentlemen in shirt tails and shiny cuff links. I anticipated being fanned and lavished upon by rapturous argentines as I recounted, in my impeccable Spanish, my opinion of the current economic crisis and possible solutions. They would occasionally offer, of course, to bring me another drink which I would obviously decline since no lady should ever be caught drunk in a Museum.

Why would you call a club a "Museum" if not to insinuate such things? If you want to have a sweaty warehouse with half-naked women massaging their breasts and clean-shaven creepers sidling up to any moving target with only pick up lines and pungent cologne to warn of the incoming attack, why not call the place something (anything!) other than Museum?!

Museums are places of higher learning, of expanding ones grasp of the world and once I realized there would not be attractive men dropping grapes into my mouth while expounding on the history of the founding of Rio de la Plata (and telling me how beautiful and goddess like I was), I felt a little jilted.

Well, I guess the case could be argued that it was a species of experiential education, like one of those anxiety-filled "choose your own adventure" novels in which one must frantically choose between fording across a pack of recently awoken abominable snow men or delve head first into a lava pit with only an icy-hot pack to protect from the blistering heat. A lesson in survival, really.

We weren't wrestling yetti's nor crossing volcanos, but it felt every bit like an extreme sport. Maeve, Flora and I set ourselves up in a circle, dancing, at first, very subdued so as not to call attention to ourselves. I have often read how the female of a species, such as a duck, are physically nondescript and tend to blend like wallflowers into their natural habitat to avoid the onslaught of predators. Natural selection has encouraged this process- if the ducks were found out by the wily fox sniffing around below their nest, next years ducks or peacocks would dissapear in a whirl of stomach acid and saliva and then what?

For us, the solution was the same (or so we thought) though the problem was inverted. Our prerogative was not procreation (though the men seemed to ardently believe it so), but rather freedom to be disconnected from any life cycle or mating ritual. To be in stop-time and escape our own image, the compatibility of male and female anatomy, to be a formless amoeba undulating anonymously to ABBA on the dance floor. So we wriggled cautiously, attempting to blend into our natural habitat of strobe lights and lithe bodies. I think we must have done an unconvincing job of it because soon we were no longer dancing but fending for out lives as the foxes descended. Any and all evasive tactics were fair game- errant elbows, foot stomps, swinging fists that we pretended, in our dancing queen ecstasy, to lose control over and catapult accidentally into the fast approaching crotches of an annoyingly loafer-ed Fabio. We soon realized that blending in was not only ineffective, but inspired the exact response we had hoped to avoid. Puzzled, it took a few more Jack and cokes and a minor mid-boogie tumble for us to realize that if you really want to be left alone, dance like a complete idiot.

Soon we were busting out moves we wouldn't even try in the privacy of our own homes, sashaying and MC Hammering and air guitar-ing our way to freedom. I guess our night at the museum wasn't so devoid of useful knowledge after all.

Running Errands