Trying to “Vogue—Vogue—Vogue—” with my sister,
I spy her daughter Kim wedged in a clamshell booth
with her best friends, who keep reboosting their boobs
in their too-little little black dresses, no doubt enlisting
the oldest-looking or most flirtatious of the three
to score cocktails at the back bar where we won’t see.
How absurd we must seem: middle-aged, sweaty,
and loopy in a room teeming with cosmopolitan queers
trying to squeeze into younger selves but spilling out
like those boobs and our dirty martinis as we shimmy
to a dated remix of Chaka Kahn’s “I Feel for You!”
My niece stiffly waves back whenever we sashay by
on a sloppy Conga line some drag queen commandeered
and I wince, imagining the Sorry! eye rolls Kim offers
her friends for suffering Just one more hour! before
they dash for a club with bouncers who let fake IDs slip in.
Refusing to Macarena or Chicken Dance, I wonder how
my sister and I got this old. Our Molly Ringwald snarls—
still intact—easily could slice in half a simple eye roll!
Were we knock-offs of our parents’ pals with their garish
jewelry and stale brand of slang (Fah godsakes—could ya
just die?) as if intending to embarrass us kids at all those
Lions Club meetings and annual Toys-for-Tots drives.
Did my niece look at me and somehow see her version
of my father’s best buddy—Burt, who, all scrunched up,
once pedaled a Big Wheel straight across a banquet room,
eyes bulging like Dali’s as he warned waiters: Watch out!
Delivering toys here, please! And now … the snapshot
in Kim’s mind: Me and her mom desperately clinging
to a drag queen’s waist in a Conga line.
