This morning at the gym Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” played on my ipod and here came a flood of memories- I remembered playing that album when it was new, listening to it in the little efficiency apartment I rented over Dollar Bill’s Saloon on Vine Street in Cincinnati, where I could climb out the window onto the roof to lie in the sun, and a neighbor down the hall painted all of her walls pitch black, you would go in there and disappear, another neighbor pretty much lived in Dixie’s Bar down the street, where I worked at night, while also dancing in a small modern dance company. Dixie’s is where I met Johnny Fiasco, a bartender and nephew of Rita and Julian who owned the place, in whose basement he lived, and where I soon lived with him. Julian would drink a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon on his days off, and I’d help him with yard work. I imagined a homey Italian family but found myself instead throwing out Johnny’s drunken friends in the middle of the night and listening to lies designed to justify visits to an old girlfriend (e.g., she’s dying of a brain tumor, for one example). Rita made wonderful raviolis. Oh my. How things change.