Friday night :Brenda Atkinson
Friday nights, as all Johannesburg’s near- jaded know, are no simple affair. Outbursts of spontaneous venue-crawling are likely to go unrewarded. Planning is everything.
In the spirit of urban social conspiracy – theorists everywhere, my partner and I prepared well in advance.
Playing 007 to my 003, on Tuesday he sent me a Flash animated e-mail card with the following warning: “I’m at the centre of a government conspiracy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be together… eventually.”
We arranged to meet at the Sharkpool – not a funky new Jo’burg venue but a Secret Destination (codeword: Anywhichwaybutsnooze). Dressed in black tuxedo with cool contemporary touches (him) and long black dress (me), we had a minor disagreement about the second Secret Destination, then settled on conveyor-belt sushi at Norwood’s Yo-Sushi (protein is the sound basis of a successful Friday night out).
This was my first venture into conveyor- sushi, and not one I will repeat. While the pleasures of sitting in the equivalent of a Japanese diner in glam-black eveningwear are not to be underestimated, the novelty impact of raw fish sweating beneath plastic lids as it swung round and round soon wore off.
We paid and headed up Grant Avenue to Mezze for choc-mousse cake and espresso. Refused entry (we developed quite a conspiracy theory around that), 007 and I regrouped at the black Z3-Special (yeah right) for a new strategy, lamenting the passing of the Pink Piano Lounge and its fab drag queens and failed pool sharks.
We agreed on the Hyatt’s Jabulani Bar, boldly refusing to be intimidated by the price of strawberry daiquiris at rand- dollar exchange rates. For an hour or so, at least a dozen gridded TV monitors set into the wall featured a lithe and gorgeous woman singing and flaunting her sixpack. Insisting that this could not be Sade, I lost the bet and had to buy 007 another daiquiri, delivered with grace and speed by the ethnically attired waiter (they were no doubt in cahoots). When the cool-as- crushed-ice live jazz ensemble hit the floor, we grinned and hit the floor too.
The Jabulani is a Johannesburg secret so well kept we often forget about it ourselves, but their jazz evenings are rich in groove and low on self-consciousness.
We jazzed out and down to Foundation for a few sessions of hard house, but felt upstaged and, to be honest, a little old. We drove longingly past Paparazzi, but knew that there we’d be exposed for the spontaneously-seeking-a-good-time types that we are.
By the time we sashayed into Picasso’s -an old Rosebank hideout begging to be revisited – we submitted to the fiendish torture sessions of a group of drop-dead- hip black babes from Amsterdam, who interrogated us while feeding us more daiquiris.
These girls had such attitude they made Elizabeth the Virgin Queen look like a useless old tart. They fought off attractive men with sharp words to the groin and demanded that we reveal our identities.
Lipstick smudged and tux wrinkled, pockets empty of cash, we told them everything.