Quiero Ser Tu Canción Feliz

I watched the play through a door.  At least 70 people crammed into Michael T. Jackson's loft for the "San Telmistico" theater presentation/acoustic concert/tango show/party Event (so big it requires capitalization).  The play--a one-act written, directed, and narrated by MTJ himself, started about an hour-and-a-half after the party began.  By the time the lights went down for the production, everyone had already gorged themselves on wine and beer (20+ bottles of vino tinto on the kitchen counter, nearly as many liters of beer in the fridge) and cheese-and-ham empanadas, pizza, cucumber/tomato/bread things, beer bread, a strawberry-lemon dessert.  MTJ announced from the stairs to take a seat, and the crowd, cowed by gluttony, smushed into the back half of the loft, all sitting on the floor (all barefoot since MTJ does not allow footwear inside his home; a large pile of shoes took up considerable space on the patio).  No space for me, I stood near the kitchen.  The patio door was opened inward, between me and the stage.  I watched through its window, a small jellyfish painted onto the glass.

The play was in Argentine Spanish, and from the number of laughs by the Spanish-speakers in the crowd, I guess it was funny.  MTJ's been in BsAs for 2 years, speaks impeccable Spanish---I was more impressed by the rapidity of his Castellano narration than anything else.  From what I could gather, the main character was a philosopher or philosophy student holed up in a San Telmo casa de libros---house of books---where a friend comes to talk to him about girl problems.  A clever move on the part of the director was this:  at a point early in the play, the actors moved to the kitchen (it was to be a back room, filled with more books), and as they stepped through the sitting crowd, they acted as though the audience were stacks of books.  The play ended on a toilet, on the stairs.  Apparently, the philosopher had drunk too much mate.  He wiped his ass with a page torn from some philosophy book, the title of which I didn't catch.

layout of MTJ's loft.

Bows & applause.  Then the actors struck the set until the whole stage area was bare.  The lights went out.  MTJ lit some candles, told us the musician is going to play.  I had guessed it would just be background music to the party, but instead we were expected to sit and listen.  By this time, a space opened up on the far wall under the stairs, next to Rachel & Lara, the girls in the writing group.  I left my spot behind the door and joined them.  The musician sat cross-legged and barefoot on the wood floor, plucked Spanishly at an acoustic guitar.  He crooned, of course, in Spanish.  I couldn't understand the lyrics, but the songs had beautiful melodies.  It wasn't hard to listen to.  Then Rachel leaned over and said, "Best lyrics ever.  He's saying 'I want to be your happiness / to take away the sadness that makes you sad.'"  She rolled her eyes.  The next song, he sang the refrain "Quiero ser tu canción feliz," and she smirked.  "'I want to be your happy song,'" she told me.  Even allowing for something lost in translation, those are terrible lyrics.  I preferred not knowing.

The guitarist stood to play his last song, and a couple entered from stage left (another patio door).  The guy was dressed to the nines, clean-shaven and Italianate.  The woman's black hair was pulled back and pinned; she wore black pants with one leg slit up to the crotch like Jessica Rabbit.  They took their positions, bodies close, hand in hand, ready to tango (not a metaphor), the woman's back to us, her ass so perfect in those pants I was reminded this was also an art exhibit.  There is something about the tango that is both stiff and graceful.  Precise might be the word.  Passionate & precise. The way their feet and bodies moved---it was stunning to watch.  After one song, the musician was replaced by blaring tango records, and the dancers kept moving, smoothly, as if 70 pairs of eyes were not even watching them.

When the dance finished, the party resumed.  I mingled as much as I could.  There were Americans, Brits, Argentines, maybe others there.  Enough people spoke English.  Jess was around somewhere, too.  We finished our wine, and when we left around midnight, the party seemed as though it had just begun.  We walked home, half drunk, through the neighborhood MTJ had mythologized in his play: San Telmo, with its scrollworked old buildings and narrow cobbled streets, its philosophers and artists, its broken sidewalks, its graffiti'd acid-trip murals, and it's history, nearly 500 years in the making.  My own history with Buenos Aires is, by now, 5 weeks old.  With San Telmo, less.  At the party, I told Lara, who's been in BsAs more than a year, that I didn't think I'm cut out for expat life.  She smiled and said, "You just got here."