"You're playing my girl!" It was 3:30 am, and this was my last passenger of the night. I always save favorite CDs for the last hour, so I was listening to Dahlia. My passenger simply could not believe this, as he said repeatedly. "Do you know Jennifer?" he asked. I said that I did not, beyond having her in my cab a couple of times. "This is my girl!" He then told me that the two of them dated, and proceeded to list all the ways in which she is wonderful, all the way to our destination. The image of Dahlia's Jennifer Folker singing in a Hawaiian cave, with the sun streaming down through a fissure in the roof, her voice ringing off the rocks, will stay with me for a long time.
Now it's 10 pm three weeks later, and I'm picking up two girls at Colosso. And lo and behold, one of them is Jennifer. I tell her about picking up her ex. "Oh, wow, I'm so happy that you got to tell me that story!" She tells me what a great guy he is, a bit about what's going on in New York, that she's happy.
By the time we get to Sabala's, she and her friend are doing the cab-ride calculus that determines if you can still drink after paying for your ride, with enough left for a cab home. I tell them it's on me. "Are you sure?" Absolutely, I say.
That story may have made her happy, but the show she and Keith Schreiner recently did at the Doug Fir made me even happier. I miss Dahlia.
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