ham fisted theatrics

A cool thing happened the other day, and like most cool things, it would not have happened had something extremely uncool happened immediately beforehand.

In December, I was driving home from a record release party for a band called Hi Ho Silver Oh. I am friends with almost all the people in the band, in addition to being in love with them. (They contributed a song to the "Boy Who Couldn't Sleep" mixtape, available here) I had a blast. I was jamming their freshly released CD and thinking about how much I liked them when I was pulled over by a cop and ticketed for being on my cellphone (which I'm almost certain I wasn't - I definitely wasn't talking on the phone - but I just went with it, like I tend to do with cops) and for not having a California license though my car is registered in the state. (Apparently you are supposed to get a California license within ten days of registering your car. I had been living in the state for six months at this point.)

Last week was the date I was scheduled to appear at the courthouse. I spent all morning at the DMV getting a California license, and then drove, in merciless rain, to a big gray law monolith. I parked my car in the subterranean garage underneath the courthouse. I stood in a line that ran out the front door and into the rain to go through a metal detector. Once through the metal detector, I contemplated two very confusing signs directing me to one bank of windows, or possibly another bank of windows. I ended up betting wrong and spending forty-five minutes in the wrong line. There was a man at the front of the line who would tell you if you were in the wrong line or not. The reasoning for having this man at the front of the line as opposed to the back was not printed anywhere, on any sign, in any language. I got in the other line. Once at the window, the woman told me I was to return on a day in April at 8:30 in the morning. I'd assumed I would be done with the whole ordeal that day, but the legal wrangling will drag on through April, meaning that I will not think about it again until my phone alarm goes off three months from now, twenty-four hours before I'm supposed to appear in court, and I'll say, "OH! Right. Shit."

I rode the elevator back down to the parking garage. Some employees were listening to a radio and the music was echoing off the drippy cavern walls. The song was "Having A Party" by Sam Cooke. I thought about how much I liked the song and how you often hear "Twisting The Night Away" but you don't hear "Having A Party" near enough. I got in my car and drove up the ramp. It was now completely sunny outside.

That night, I went to a Hi Ho Silver Oh show with my friend Ben in a neat art space a few blocks from where, a couple of weeks prior, I had waited in my car for a seemingly endless procession of hip kids on bicycles to ride beneath an underpass before I could keep driving, causing me to feel like a reactionary old crank as they kept coming and coming and coming, streaming out of Silverlake, occasionally holding up their hands as if to say, "Be cool and don't kill us with your car!"

The band got on-stage, or rather, moved to the section of the floor where the bands were playing at this show. Casey announced that the first part of their first song would be a sing-along. He started to instruct us on how this would go. He would sing a line, and we would repeat after him, so it would sound like this:

"Havin' a party..."

"HAVIN' A PARTY!"

"Everybody's swingin'..."

"EVERYBODY'S SWINGIN'!"

"Dancin' to the music..."

"DANCIN' TO THE MUSIC!"

"On the radio..."

"ON THE RADIO!"

It was the call-and-response part of "Having A Party" by Sam Cooke, the song I had heard earlier that day in the parking garage underneath the courthouse when I was in an entirely different mood, while dealing with a ticket I got after the last performance I saw of this very same band, and it kicked off an excellent show. A pretty bitchin' coincidence.

I'm not saying there's a cosmic ribbon that runs through everything, but if there is, there's no reason it wouldn't be Sam Cooke.