Barefoot and shivering in the dark, I shoved the oak dresser in front of the door. Why was I rearranging furniture in the middle of the night? It was all the fault of flamenco. 

My date from earlier that evening was on the other side of the flimsy door—apparently incited by our wild experience at the flamenco cabaret. Fists pounding. Demanding entry.

Maybe he was remembering the way the dancers hoisted me onto the tabletop, how my quick-dry flower-print skirt lifted and swirled as the gypsy guitarists sizzled. 

I was a student from California who only spoke English and had just arrived in Paris a few weeks earlier, on my 18^th birthday. No one danced on tabletops where I came from. I had never even seen a flamenco dancer before tonight. Clearly I had been possessed.

While renting a room at the Alliance Française boarding house (I had promised my parents I would stay somewhere respectable), I met a doctor from Spain also lodging there. He asked me out on a date. The bland cabbage soup served every meal and tedious daily French lessons taught by mothball-scented, pince-nez-clad instructors were getting stale. Music, dinner, a club! So what if he was half my height, twice my age, had a giant head, and wore owlish spectacles? 

The other girls at the boarding house were envious when I showed up in the dining room wearing my fox fur coat and heels. 

One of them cooed, “Oooh, going on a hot date?”

“Adieu,” I said to them in my newfound French vocabulary, followed by “Tout à l’heure”—see ya later. They scowled. Then the doctor entered the room and took my arm. The girls burst into laughter when they saw who was taking me out on the town. 

The doctor was a gentleman and ignored their rude tittering. He opened the door with a little bow, and frigid December air rushed past as we stepped onto the wet cobblestone sidewalk. He spoke only a smidgen of English, but no problemo: I was intrigued by his Andalusian accent.

We walked together, exchanging awkward pleasantries for a few blocks before turning into a passage. It led to a shadowy stairwell that stopped at a splintered wooden door. My date knocked twice, sharply. The door creaked open, revealing a vibrant, smoke-hazed club packed with handsomely striking, dark-haired people. I was the only blonde. 

A group waved us over. He introduced me, though it was impossible to gather up everyone’s names. Spanish words were layering around me like lace on a mantilla, and enthusiastic olé!’srippled from the crowd to the flurry of dancers among the tables. Fiery guitar strumming and staccato clapping throbbed. This felt like the heart of flamenco in Paris.

The doctor’s friends crammed even more tightly together around the banquette, making room. Goblets of blood-red sangria were slapped down in front of us, and impassioned howls and whoops swirled about like a cyclone. 

Vibrating on a chair next to me was a woman enveloped in the rhythmic pulse cresendoing on the guitarists’ flying fingers. She rose slowly and strode into the space between the tables. 

“Olé!”the musicians called, then stopped their thrumming and drumming. The other dancers retreated to perch on empty laps and arms of chairs, the rustling of skirts the only sound in this suddenly quiet cavern. With long fingers, she gathered up the hem of her frilly dress that dragged behind her like a bridal gown. Deliberately, she rotated and met our eyes with a challenge. 

“Watch this!” her alluring smile commanded.

A black heel struck the ground. 

The dancer raised her arms, hands and fingers undulating like hibiscus flowers opening in hot sunlight. Her neck stretched upward, swan-like, head held high. She snapped her fingers and stomped, keeping time with the raking strings and raspy growls of the Spanish guitar that had seemingly fallen under her spell. Candle sconces bathed the ancient limestone walls in amber light, the flames jumping and dipping with the music.

Men in tight, shiny slacks rose from their seats. Women surged forward. They jostled and joined the rousingspectacle. Everyone in the club, from teenagers to grandparents, was a fabulous dancer. I, on the other hand, was feeling intensely out of my element and was not about to add my frugging moves to the mayhem. 

Bittersweet sangria flowed freely. Pressed into my side on the cigarette-burned leather bench, the doctor smiled giddily and shouted, “Olé!” His sticky hand gently clasped mine. I barely noticed. Then, as if spring-loaded, he shook my hand free and launched himself into the fray. The dancers moved to the sidelines, making way for him in his tattered suit, gleaming black patent leather shoes, and over-large spectacles. 

Transformation had never happened so quickly. Lifting up on his toes, arms extended skyward, the doctor was suspended in stillness, smooth and smoky-eyed as Clark Gable. Snakelike, he turned and stared piercingly into my eyes. His tongue flicked across his lips and he lifted an eyebrow. 

No one breathed. 

He snapped his fingers, accelerating the pace until his hips began to sway. Shouts of encouragement from the crowd propelled him and his feet caught fire, pounding their way around the wooden floor.

The woman next to me unfurled her tortoise shell fan trimmed with lace. 

“Él es caliente,” she breathed, eyeing the doctor. He was definitely a big fish in this pond.

Damp with sweat, I wished I had a fan, too. It was as hot as Hades. Sipping sangria and gnawing on the tart Valencia orange slices floating in the glass cooled me down. As I set the drink on the table, arms shoved me into the mêlée. The doctor grabbed me around the waist and fixed me with his gaze until I had no choice. I raised my arms and looked downward past his bushy eyebrows into his flushed face. 

I clapped and shouted my first Olé!  

Really, did I just do that? 

It sounded awkward, like the infant French I was still stumbling over, but after a few more times, it felt right. “Olé!” I twisted my knee-length skirt back and forth, mimicking the other female dancers swirling around me. The fabric flew like rose petals in a windstorm. 

“Olé! Olé! Olé!” My shouts grew louder and louder. With each utteranceI felt wilder, stronger—a roaring lioness!  

Every table was crowned with a fiery woman spinning and stomping. The dancers were like woodpeckers, making dents in the already pockmarked oak surface with their sturdy heels as, bull-like, the men pawed and snorted around the tables. 

Someone grabbed my thighs and lifted me onto a tabletop, and the doctor reluctantly loosened his grip on my waist. 

“Ouch!” I shrieked, my skin pinched and squeezed between the fingers of whoever was hoisting me. The Ouch! turned into an Olé! as his or her grip loosened and I was set free. More triumphant Olé!’s followedas I realized I’d graduated to a tabletop stage.  

Had someone dropped me into a flamenco musical? Was the sangria spiked with a hallucinogenic substance? These insanely passionate theatrics went on for hours. I didn’t have one conversation all night due to the din and the dervish-like fever around me. 

Clap, dance, snap, Olé! 

Clap, dance, snap, Olé! 

Clap, dance, snap, drink, Olé! 

What a tornado of festivity!

Finally, the pace slowed down. Clapping ceased. Guitar cases clicked shut. Skirts were adjusted. Shoelaces were tied. The excitement faded, and everyone clustered in subdued cliques, gulping the ice in the bottom of their glasses. 

Ankles swollen, feet sore, I wiggled my toes stuffed tight into heels. The doctor, whom I had almost forgotten about, stood in front of me, ushering me into my coat and to the exit. The wooden door swung open to let us out into the frosty evening, and when we stepped into the winter cold, beads of sweat chilled my skin. I pulled the fur collar around my ears.

On our walk back through the quiet streets, I complimented the doctor on his flamenco finesse and abundant exuberance.  

With a gracious buenos noches and a dry-lipped kiss on the hand, he disappeared down the hallway. I was relieved he had departed without a request to enter my room. It had been a dreamy evening, but he was not my Romeo.  

Pooped, I lay down on the saggy twin bed and wondered why I’d had the misfortune to be raised in a boring American middle-class neighborhood. I could have been born into a gypsy flamenco family, where stomping feet and frenzied dancing were encouraged, and shouting, “Olé!” was as normal as frying an egg. At least I’d found my way here 18 years later and extricated myself from suburbia. With a smile of satisfaction, I drifted into sleep.

A sharp rap jolted me out of bed. It was 4 a.m. Slurred whispers of an inebriated man slithered under the door. Then, banging and yelling in Spanish. There was no doubt who was on the other side. With a disgusted grunt and a prickly rush of adrenaline, I pushed the oak dresser in front of the door, blocking his entry before he elbowed his way into my room. What a devil!  

Drowsily, I leaned against the dresser for an hour. As morning light dawned and the doctor finally stopped his drunken hammering, I heaved the bureau back where it belonged and opened the door. A crack, no more. No doctor—not even a slumped one in the hallway. 

I stormed down to the manager’s office. “Why didn’t anyone come to help me?” I demanded. “Surely you could hear the doctor’s tirade from your room. You could probably hear him all the way to Marseille!” 

“It is your fault that he behaved that way,” the dour matron replied stiffly. “It’s not my problem if you are a slut.” 

Incensed, I slapped a fistful of francs on her desk to pay the bill. No more cabbage soup or shitty French lessons for me! Bag packed, I stormed out and marched all over the Left Bank, looking for cheap lodging.

On streets I’d never walked before, down yet another narrow alley, a crooked hand-painted hotel sign bearing the likeness of a smiling gypsy woman caught my eye.

I opened the door to the hotel. The woman depicted on the sign was sitting behind a desk in the lobby, which more resembled a living room. Dried flowers hung from the ceiling, and bulging sofas, throw rugs, and a gas fire kept the place cozy. The gypsy wore a floor-length ruffled dress with a neckline showing off her décolletage. Her arms were stacked with clanking bangles.

She barely glanced at me until I asked in broken, American-accented French, “Do you have a room?”

Curious, she looked me up and down. I got the impression she didn’t like other women very much, but I was just a girl. Her eyes warmed, a slight smile spreading across her exotic face. “And where are you from, ma chère?”

“California.”

“Ah, I have a brother in Bakersfield. He sells cars. That’s what gypsies do in America. In Europe we trade horses; in America we trade cars.” 

Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the Alice in Wonderland quality to the place, but I had no response.

Her voice was smoky and redolent—spiced with a naughty humor. “My name is Renee. You may call me Madame and I will call you La Rubia.” She was quite pleased with herself for giving me a nickname before I even had a room. She winked and asked, “Do you know what my name for you means?”

My tired brain tried to recall my last pitiful French lesson. “Ruby?”

“No, it is what we call blonde-haired people in Spanish.” She cocked her head to the side and looked me over again with an air of concern. “Do you eat paella? Couscous? I am a very good cook. And you are too thin!” She waggled a finger at me, causing her bracelets to jangle musically.

I was struggling to stand up straight, I was so tired. “Madame Renee, I love to eat but do you have a room for me?”

She pointed up the stairs and said, “Room six, two floors up. Three dollars a night. Bathroom in the hallway, shower on the top floor. No animals.”

The winding stairwell was so cramped, I had to squeeze my shoulders together even though, as Madame Renee had pointed out, I was very slim. 

Room six, the last of three rooms on the floor, was perfect: windows that faced the alleyway, high enough for light to stream in—yet it was quiet. It had two twin beds and a bidet I washed the dishes in, much to the horror of my future French friends. 

It only cost me $1.50 a night because I rented half the room to Elaine, another Alliance Française student, who had secret liaisons there with her very sexy boyfriend, unbeknownst to her Catholic parents in New Jersey. It didn’t bother me that they were swinging from the rafters. I’d be out all day on walkabouts, discovering the delights of Paris. When I returned, usually after dallying on one of the bridges, hypnotized by a glorious sunset splashing coppery-apricot hues on the ripples of the Seine, they’d be gone. Elaine still spent nights at the Alliance Française boarding house for her parents’ sake. They didn’t have a clue that it wasn’t the falsely advertised prim educational haven for foreign students learning French.  

On the day I found this affordable haven, Madame said, “You do not have to lock your door here, La Rubia. I will keep you safe.” It was as if she had read my mind and was visualizing that drunken doctor pounding on my door the night before. 

No one was going to get away with any funny business while Madame Renee sat guard in the lobby. She had a sharp tongue and an intolerance for nonsense that made her yell frequently, keeping obnoxious men at bay. Luckily, due to the good looks and charm of Elaine’s boyfriend, she made an exception for them, turning a blind eye to their trysts upstairs. When I’d return from my daily wanderings, she’d say, “Too bad he is not your boyfriend! Such a handsome man. Funny, because your friend is very ordinaire but I think she is good in bed—like a French woman.” 

Madame swiftly took a liking to me. I was her daughter’s age. I’d spend hours on the stool beside her desk, begging for more stories told in her husky voice about her gypsy upbringing in France. 

Flicking a match tip with her fingernail on one such day, Madame Renee lit an unfiltered Gauloises cigarette. 

“How did you end up in Paris running a hotel?” I asked.

Smoked plumed around her as she laughed hoarsely. “I grew up wild like the ponies we raised in the countryside. My father wanted to marry me off really young, but I was independent. I knew I wanted to raise children who would go to University—the first ones in my family. So here I am in the big city. This is my business. All mine. The children have different fathers.”

To keep on her good side, I’d babysit her toddler son whenever she had to run errands or go for coffee with a certain man. She’d bat her dark lashes and soften her voice whenever he visited. It was always a pleasant surprise to witness this sweeter version of her. The man appeared every few weeks with a bouquet of flowers that he picked—or “borrowed,” as he once explained to me as we waited for Madame to gussy-up —from other people’s gardens. The arrangement depended on the season: violets, daffodils, roses, lilacs, sunflowers. They provided the dried flowers hanging from the rafters. Madame Renee kept every bunch. I was taller than her, so I’d stand on the chair and hang the latest offering when it faded. 

For six months I lived in this potpourri palace of funk, loving every minute. Tucked into an alley off of Rue Dauphine on the Left Bank, two blocks from Pont Neuf on the Seine, it provided the gypsy lifestyle I’d been fantasizing about ever since walking into the flamenco club with that Jekyll and Hyde doctor. Every room was rented to some starving artist or vagabond traveler like myself—for I had traded in my student cap for that of an extemporaneous explorer. I considered myself a student of the world and because my parents weren’t supporting me, and I was 18 years old, I could liberate myself.

Day after day, Renee shouted and sang boleros in the lobby, and at mealtimes fishy odors of paella and frying onions emanated from her apartment. The other residents included a curly-haired flamenco guitarist who lived in the attic, a pale fortune teller in the room next to mine, and a grizzled Italian cartographer who suffered from malaria deliriums and never left his room. Best of all was the old gypsy who set up a ladder in the alley below my window. He banged a tambourine while his dancing bear wobbled its way to the ladder top and did furry versions of flamenco. The bear would descend and take the money cap in his mouth, nudging spectators for spare change. I’d throw a franc out my window and sometimes it even landed in the hat.

“No animals, Madame Renee?”  I asked teasingly one day. The bear was also a resident and lived in the back garden in a makeshift pen.  

 “Ma chere,” she laughed, “that old man is my uncle. The bear is his family.”

Then there was Danny, the odd employee of Renee’s who delivered breakfast trays holding steaming bowls of café au lait and fresh baguettes to our door every morning. A Hungarian gypsy whom Renee had taken under her wing when he was a kid, Danny shaved his head and wore only a loincloth—even in the middle of winter. He was a kleptomaniac, frequently stealing my few belongings. Renee tipped me off that I could retrieve them in the dungeon-like basement where he also slept. In the hours I knew he was out, I’d go down there with a candle to dig around. Sure enough, my scarf or purse would be under a chair or hanging on a hook against the moisture-seeping limestone walls, the money still tucked into the billfold. For he never really “stole” anything—just moved it around. 

At night, we penniless residents were our own and only source of entertainment, and the upstairs rooms of the hotel turned into a combo carny show and flamenco club. We practiced our wine-fueled flamenco moves in the fortune teller’s room until Renee yelled up the stairwell for us to knock it off, afraid the floor would collapse and send us crashing into the rooms below. Then, we’d go to the room above to visit the morose fado singer from Portugal with bluish streaks under her eyes, who left her door open as an invitation to enter. A candle burned and a bottle of cheap wine was opened, a few dirty glasses passed around. We’d crowd on the floor, waiting to hear the lyrical moans of sadness seeping through her translucent peignoir.

Sometimes Danny would join us, silently squatting against the wall, smoking clove cigarettes that he heisted from the fortune teller. He’d startle us when he’d leap up nimbly and throw himself into a frenzied flamenco dance wearing only his loincloth. I’d yell Olé!,but secretly worried he might get too excited and yank his loincloth off like a matador’s cape. 

Oddly enough, the fortune teller was not a gypsy—or a very good soothsayer—but a runaway from Estonia. But it did not matter. This strange, Fellini-esque place provided me the freedom to dance and yell Olé! whenever I felt like it. In the shower. Out the window to the dancing bear. Everybody else shouted—why shouldn’t I? It was a world away from the hushed tones and polite conversations I had grown up in. 

“`

Forty-five years after my foray into the world that is flamenco and all things gypsy, I still stay with Madame Renee when I’m in Paris. She continues to hold court in her lobby that looks more like a living room. Her proportions are now more pachyderm than gazelle, her long black tresses have turned a dull silver, and her voice is even more gravelly from decades of shouting and smoking. The rooms have been renovated and cost thirty times more. Madame Renee’s coterie of bohemian characters are no longer residents. The dancing bear doesn’t live in the garden. 

But some things never change: the hotel still smells like potpourri and paella, and I still get a rush every time I shout Olé!. It reminds me of that night I bellowed my first Olé!, stomping like a barefoot grape crusher with head held high, sangria splashing, just a few weeks into my 18^th year. 

Now, so many decades after my first taste of flamenco, I wonder if that club the horny doctor took me to was a dream. Did it really exist? Every time I’m in Paris, I look down passages and dark stairwells, hoping to find it again.

This story is included in my book Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe