Yesterday, I saw the hawk on my way in to work. Today, I encountered a character from R&B legend, previously believed to be fictional.
There was this late-model white Mustang coming up behind me on Sunset Boulevard, coming on too fast. I got into the right lane, preparing to get onto the ramp for Jarvis Klapman, and it started to zip past me — but then we were both stopped by a traffic light.
My eye was drawn to the furious activity going on in the driver’s seat of that car. It was a young woman who was very busy applying makeup. She had a powder brush in her right hand, and rather than brushing it on, she seemed to be aggressively stabbing her cheek with the brush, and looking in her rearview to check the effect. Maybe she was trying to redden her cheek under the powder.
Then, I noticed the cigarette smoke curling up from her left side, partly blocked by her head. So I’m pretty sure that hand was fully occupied, too.
The light changed, and she stomped on the accelerator, and rushed away.
It was then that I realized that I had just seen Mustang Sally herself.
She needs to slow that Mustang down…
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Stippling powder on gives a different effect than brushing it on….
I met Mustang Sally in 1971. Leaving my job at Hickam AFB about 3 a.m. one night, I was at the stoplight just outside of the base. I was driving my souped-up Monza. A ’66 Mustang pulled up next to me with a total babe at the wheel. She gunned her engine. I gunned my engine. She gunned her engine. I gunned my engine. When the light changed, she flicked her cigarette butt at my car and was over the horizon before I was out of first gear.
And as she sped away, you yelled after her pathetically, “Yeah, you BETTER run! Gonna put your flat feet on the GROUND, woman!”
For some reason, I now flash on a story I remember you telling about another such encounter, also in 1971. If I recall correctly, you and some of our mutual friends pulled up next to a car at a traffic light, and who was in the car next to you but Lippy Espinda! You greeted him with a barrage of enthusiastic pidgin. He turned, glanced over your haole faces, and said, “I wish you boys would cut that out.” And drove away.
Did I remember that right?
You remember that exactly right! However, your readers may not know that Lippy’s “public” persona was that of a pidgin-english mumblemouth.