God, after all the chazzarai (is that how you spell it, Yiddish peoples?) about Joon-Yah and Peter, it feels so anticlimactic to even attempt a posting about Abel's performance at Alegria (which, incidentally, am I the last person to know that it's pronounced like trattoria and NOT with an emphasis on the leg? Excuse me, but I didn't learn Portugese.)

But I feel as if I've learned so much from reading all these postings about Junior, and it parallels some of the thoughts I had as I was partying with Abel at Alegria, so why not get it off the titties as everyone else has been doing.

There was something Lawrence said which captured, for me, the whole situation, and the word is EXPECTATION.

Going to an Alegria party, I guess I do have expectations, even when I try not to get over-hyped about the evening, knowing that comparisons are generally unfair, given that our own personal situations and head spaces and mindsets and body issues differ so much from moment to moment. But at best, I try to to keep my expectations to something as low as: HAVE A GOOD TIME.

As Saint Madonna used to say, "Happiness is in the palm of your hand."

So, yes, Robert and I had a wonderful time with Abel, and Robert admitted a new respect for him, and I came away admiring him even more than when he entertained us so well at the post-Gay Pride Alegria. The whole tribal thing worked for us, and we had loads of fun wandering around and thinking about tribes in general and identifying tribes we noticed and passing through the Mother Africa tribe and the Inca tribe and the Glow Stick tribe and the Treasure Trail Tribe, etc. ad nauseam, but it was entertaining for us, even if it doesn't translate here. Maybe it was all the elephant tusk horns around the light ring over the floor.

So if you settled into the tribal mode, then probably you felt fine about the music. Personally, I loved the groove Abel got going and kept going. We were there from three until eight a.m. The floor stayed packed, but, fortunately, not like those nights when you're forced to merely sway with the motion of the thousands squeezed in all around you.

It was nice to see women there, too. Sexy women. And some of them with sexy straight boys. I think there might have been some sort of hoity-toity party on the fourth floor during the early part of the night; maybe that's where they came from. Wherever, it was nice to see them having fun.

Everyone seemed to be happy. I didn't notice any fall-outs, and it made me think about an article I'd read in the Book Review of the Times about the introduction of gin to London's population in the 18th century. Apparently, the "masses" were accustomed to quaffing beer by the pint, and with the introduction of gin, they felt they could quaff that by the pint too -- and soon after, people were dying in the streets. Literally. And it reminded me how it sometimes takes a while for a "drug" to enter the mainstream and find its "proper" place. Maybe that's what has happened with some of our more cited stimuli.

The thing I was thinking most about, though, even on the floor, while dancing, was how much goes into these parties that we attend, and often, take for granted. There's so much preparation, and all the decorating and rehearsing and planning and selling tickets and appeasing local governments and pay-offs, perhaps, and promotion and hope and hype, and really, I, for one, just love it when it all comes together. I mean, I am so grateful for all the behind-the-scenes people who work to insure that my time at Alegria is a good time. And that's the way I so often feel about so many circuit events I attend. Sometimes my eyes move from the lights to the deejay to the decorations to the performers to the crowd and the space and I can't help but think, Wow, what a great show -- and I'm a part of it.

The night before we went to Alegria, we hosted a dinner party for my b'day (thirty again) and some of our guests were very nearly clueless about the circuit and the music and the parties. So we tried to fill them in, a little, and it was them I was thinking about, too, at Alegria, and it was thinking about them that made me realize, yet again, how BLESSED and EXCEPTIONAL we are, all of us who make up the circuit.

Some nights are better than others, as so many have said here in the past few days, but even the ones which aren't quite as good still have a lot to offer, for me.