I went to the Golden West, an Albuquerque bar, last night to see El Vez. I have not gone out to bars much, or really even left the house, since I quit drinking.  Two years after the scene had ceased to become familiar, I returned to find that the bar, which when I had seen it last surged with moshers, looked like a scene from a forties sorority social.  The men wore suspenders, baggy pants, and suit jackets, while the girls wore cocktail dresses and carried little beaded bags.  As the opening band played, couples jitterbugged on the dance floor, the women delightedly twirling in their full skirts. 

As El Vez performed his Gospel extravaganza. I watched the anamalous young women.  The old cowgirl on the barstool next to ours tilted and blinked and made conversation with whoever would sit by her. Surely she felt as out of place as I did, drinking Coors after Coors in a saloon in Albuquerque, watching this twisted version of an idealized past. From our perch in the back of the bar, the girls looked like any young women from the postwar era.  But when they walked by us, on the way to powder their noses, their tan WASP arms, backs, and legs were tattooed, and their pert noses and rosebud lips were thrust through with rings and bars. 

Something about the formality of the atmosphere made me feel the same rush of shame as I felt at the holiday dances at my high school.  All the other girls, with their inimitable East Coast fashion sense, would show up looking splendidly eighties, and I would dress like a crazy hippy and go smoke joints by the lake.  In this case, I had made the mistake of dressing in a contemporary style, and my tattoos were not visible to a passer-by.  How did I miss having an innate fashion sense? I peer at the mirror over the bar, but my reflection is obscured. 

I look at the rancher lady, who is clearly having a good time tonight.  She is maybe in her sixties, maybe younger but worn out from bars and poverty and the New Mexico sun.  Her hair is bleached blond, and she has it clipped back with two plastic "silver and turquoise" barrettes.  Does she feel frumpy among these self-mutilated prom queens?  Is the beer enough of an analgesic that she feels as gay and pretty as the girls around her?  Does she think they're all crazy and that pearl-snap shirts from Wal-Mart are the only true expression of style?  If she does, who's to tell her she's wrong? 

When I was going through my trailer trash phase, I remember a pair of titty dancers at a party I went to who were concerned about my fashion sense.  I wore what I had throught was a stylish ensemble, an African leather collar necklace, a backless leotard, silk harem pants.  They were in lace and jeans, blond hair and cowboy boots.  They sat by me sympathetically and explained that they knew I felt bad because otherwise, why would I dress like that?  Wrong yet again. 

I sometimes think I have given up chasing fashion and trying to fit in, but I am often reminded of my seeming incapability to camoflouge.  I look around the bar again.  More people have come in, including two large females in satin, one tattooed on her forehead.  A stringy-haired pale girl in a flouncy dress, floral bands tattooed around her upper arms, unevenly so it looks like she's leaning over. A woman with such an unbelievable bouffant/ flip/ fall that for several minutes I thinks she is a transvestite.  Another bizarre bouffant, beneath which I catch glipses of an intricate, back-wide tattoo, intersected by the spaghetti straps on the tea-length cocktail.  This woman is older than most of the college girls, and kisses a short greybearded biker with enthusiasm. I realize that I am OK, probably invisible.  All these females around me may keep up with the mags and go shopping more often than I, but in the end, none of us have a clue how to dress. 

An old Indian, probably one of the vets who hangs out downtown, wanders by the bar and is attracted by the blond hair and bright makeup of the cowgirl.  He sits with her and they whisper and talk, she touched his face and strokes his collar.  Perhaps the pearl snaps are the right choice after all. 

do you think this is stupid?