i’ve related many stories about my doings in spain. i’m sure there are many more to come.

a little story about a girl named tina. i think her name was actually christina, but she just went by plain ole tina.

gorgeous little gypsy girl. she used to work in a bar in ‘Rota’, where i was stationed. twice. for all i know, she still works in bar “led zeppelin’s”. i bet not though.

tina could dance the sevillana better than anyone i’ve ever seen.

my drinking buddy mark and i used to frequent one of the quieter and more laid back bars in rota known as ‘schooners’

that was it’s formal name. most people refered to it as the ‘old irish bar’.

people who weren’t in the know called it that. my first tour. it was ‘the german bar’.

yeah, we had a way of renaming anything with an american nickname. like for instance, there was ‘big coffee’, ‘irish bar’, ‘safe irish bar’, ‘german bar’ and many more. but i digress.

the german bar moved, and two irish guys set up a new operation in its stead. pub o’gradys became one of the hottest spots in rota. in fact, they kind of ran the german bar out of business.

so then they moved into the ‘new german bar’, which became the new irish bar. and the old german bar / old irish bar, became schooners.

not many people stopped in that often anymore. which is kind of why mark and i liked it. no crazy seaman, or marines pissing in the street. or in the bar.

schooners had this cool cool girl working behind the bar named andrea. who was tina’s best friend. at least at the time.

one night mark and i were in there pleasantly liquored up on jaegermeister. somebody bought the whole bottle and was passing it around, and mark and i are not the types to pass up a free shot or five.

it so happened that tina was in the bar this night, wearing the skin tight beige polyester pants that all the spanish girls were wearing at the time. she looked good too. kind of unobtrusive. over in the corner, having a drink and chatting.

meanwhile, these drunk american girls were all trying to do the sevillana. andrea was teaching. a little.

so she had the sevillana music blaring. over and over.

mark and i were enjoying watching these drunk girls try to dance. and feeding them more jaeger, of course.

they finally got tired and quit after like a half hour of sevillana-ing. and gave it up.

for a moment, there was no dancing, and little petite tina, got off her bar stool and did the sevillana.

for the next 3 minutes, every single person in the room stopped and stared at her, jaws on the floor.

then she sat down like nothing had happened.

now. andrea, mark, and myself were in the habit of giving indian names to people. we liked to call some of the more undesirable customers by names like

‘face like butt’ or, ‘barf like fly’.

we named her ‘dances in bars’. it was one of the few decent names we gave out. mark and i both new that we would and will remember that little dance forever. i know that as soon as he reads the title to this entry he will see her dancing in his minds eye. and smile.

redsugar posted a couple of songs for cinco de mayo that took me back to that little whole in the wall for some reason.

she’s still dancing……..