Along with Wayne and Dan, We make a Saturday-night trek to the Golden Moon Casino. Owned and operated by the Mississippi Choctaw Indians, the Golden Moon (and its sister casino, the Silver Star) sits literally in the middle of nowhere: just outside Philadelphia, MS, surrounded by cornfields, soybean farms, and scrub pine.
We pay for the buffet and our games of video poker and roulette, but the biggest entertainment at Mississippi casinos comes free: crowd watching.
Example: as a bad local cover band butchers songs by the Commodores, we spy a Go-Go Granny and her dance partner, a big-bellied man with sun-damaged skin and a penchant for Brylcreem. As the hefty lead singer mangles Sail On, the pair take to the floor and cut the rug. No one around us finds it particularly odd or interesting when Granny squats behind Slick to deliver a fifty-second pelvic grind to his hinderparts. Slick seems pretty excited by the attention, though, poking his flat rear out as far it will go and rolling his red eyes in ecstacy.
Except for the time or two Slick rubs a smooth palm over the hillocks of Granny’s rump, the rest of their dance looks more like something out of a Pentecostal church than geriatric night at Studio 54. There is much lifting of holy hands and running-in-place, followed by a finale that includes orbiting each other twice (albeit a little unsteadily).
This amuses me to no end, until it occurs to me that Granny is out there actually living her life. Me? I’m standing on the sidelines, watching.
The evening’s most memorable image, though, is one that only Wayne sees: in the bar, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, sits a bride in full wedding regalia. Her veil, thrown back, droops. Ice rattles in her drink. She watches the crowd through slitted eyes, her free hand obsessively smoothing the silk of her gown.
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