Out on the Town

            “Dance! Dance!” insisted our host sister. My roommate and I looked around the restaurant – where were we supposed to be dancing? We were in the basement of Triplex, a snazzy Moroccan “pub”, as our host sister called it, with a talented DJ spinning oldies with a heavy dance beat. At one end of the room, a group clustered around the bar, bobbing slightly to the music. The rest of the floor was crowded with tables and chairs, mostly occupied. A semi-raised area hosted a birthday party, with men in collared shirts and girls wearing short, sleeveless dresses. I hadn’t fully realized that Moroccan women had shoulders and knees until last night. The restaurant seemed to be a small pocket where 20-somethings could try to escape to Europe or America, where they could wear trendy club clothes, drink beer and cocktails, and dance closely with the opposite sex. Not a single woman had her hair covered, and scarves and sweaters were coming off.

            We sat at our table, our tapas finished – almost all hip places in Rabat have a tapas menu, with favorites like baked goat cheese with balsamic reduction and mini paella – and we swayed surreptitiously to the catchy dance beat. Not inconspicuously enough to pass unnoticed by our host sister, who continued urging us to get up and dance. For a while we just sat, talking and laughing at the music videos. The televisions were completely unrelated to the sound, so as Peter Gabriel held Kate Bush in a tight embrace for the entirety of a five minute music video and Tina Turner turned heads walking in a denim jacket, we were listening to an *NSYNC remix and generic pop-dance tunes. Still we sat, bobbing our heads. Finally our host sister stood and motioned for us to follow her.

            We pushed in our chairs and gathered between the wall and our table. At the birthday party, a couple of the young women had stood up and started dancing in place, but besides them, everyone remained seated as a Michael Jackson mash-up played. When caught in the terribly awkward situation of having only three square feet of space between your table and the next, pressed against the wall while everyone else either watches you or ignores the three crazy women dancing in the corner, there is only one thing to do: pretend you’re at a real dance club in France, like everyone else in the room is pretending, and dance away.