Twirling: A Mostly True Story

The bar: modern day’s answer to a philosophical need.  Plans are plotted, relationships dissected, futures thwarted, pasts forgotten, and friends made, met, or lost.

There’s this one bar, on a back road behind a back road, in a town that has no business calling itself a city, but does, she and I met for a drink.

I won’t tell you much about her.  Won’t tell you her name.  I can say she was blonde, but that will only make you think things about her that aren’t necessarily true.  Stereotypes are often forged and broken at bars.  I can tell you she got a beer I’d never heard of that a little too bitter for my tastes.  It wasn’t quite midnight when we got there.  We were neither lovers nor long-time friends, but we’d met some time before.  There were things to discuss, philosophical things, involving creativity and history and architecture and circuses, and ocean-dwelling creatures big and small.  We talked about blood, real and fake.  We talked about prisons and schools and banks and crabapple trees, which I still don’t believe exist.

(As an aside, I also don’t believe in snow anymore, despite having lived through blizzards and nor’easters, despite having built snow forts and snowmen, despite waving my arms to make snow angels, and despite the absolute existence of hot chocolate.)

We probably had one drink too many, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

This was the type of bar that had tables out front, and an area cordoned off from the rest of the street.  This was a place that faced three-story row houses with balconies.  People watched us from those balconies, protected by their own silhouettes.

A crowd gathered outside.  A man in unnecessary spectacles read from a small black book.  He probably thought he looked the part.  He had the beard.  He read loudly, though he stumbled on a few words, and introduced the first of the acts we were to see.  At first, I thought he was a mere mad poet, one of a type often found outside such establishments.  But when he finally stepped out of our way so we could pass, there was the girl with the fire.

It’s not an everyday thing, girls with fire.

She held balls of fire on the end of yard-long chains, and with these balls of fire she began to dance.  She swung the flames.  Spun with them.  Blazed trails through the midnight.

(As an aside, I’ve seen girls dance with many a thing in my time, and in many a place, but never before with flames in the middle of a back road in front of a dive bar.)

The only singing was the swoosh of flames as she twirled them about her.  Up, over, all around, and briefly I wondered if perhaps it was the flames guiding her movement.

And then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over, the flames were doused, the girl barely bowed and instead retreated to the very corner of the bar’s cordoned off section of sidewalk.

The girl with whom I had shared drinks looked at me.  I asked, “Are you ready?”  She was, and we left.  On the way, bar and fire behind us, I asked, “What kind of future do you think a girl’s got in fire twirling?”

“Easy,” she answered.  “She can become an accountant or a lawyer or a salesman, maybe a nurse, maybe a singer in a band.  A girl who twirls fire, she can be anything.”