High school queens of drama club

I was sitting in a club in Hurlingham last week, the day before Valentine’s, talking to some young mzungu man about 20 years of age who is an intern at an institute that sponsors some cultural publishing jobs.

A young woman, also about 20, walks in with a man of about 40. Clearly, they are a coupling of some sort, although the man has a wedding ring and the young lady does not.

Soon my mzungu pal and the girl are making eyes secretly at each other. The 40 year-old feller gets uneasy, and loudly says they are leaving after just one drink.

“But you said we were here for nyama,” Miss Twenty pleads, but Bwana Forty is having nothing of it. My pal is wistful. “She looks pretty like that Lupita,” he sighs, “Short haired and beautifully dark skinned.”

“Ooh,” I tease him, “the sad wonders of what might have been.” Three minutes later, there’s a waiter who slips a note with the young lady’s number and name – let’s call her Valerie – into it.

Turns out she simply slipped her ‘old’ man by going to the loo, waylaid a waiter, asked him for a pen and piece of paper to put her contacts on, and for a hundred bob, sent him on his way.

Then innocently rejoined her old man.

These are the brave and brazen lasses of today, barely out of high school and already wise in the wicked ways of the world. And the weakness of men. And over the weekend in Masaku, Men Only got to see other ways these young ladies go.

These post-high school drama princesses can drink up a storm. They are like the persona in the Arctic Monkeys song who throws up lightning, and sits at a bar table like a General who has never lost a war. They also smoke bhang!

They wear skimpy clothes, never mind the weather. Come rain, come shine, come cold, come frost, go to Limuru, they are dressed for the beach. And other hot locales. Plus sunglasses.

But what really scares me these days are the body tattoos (ati ‘body art’) and tongue rings. One day they’ll kiss (many are lipstick lesbos), their tongue rings entangle, and the spectacle leave everyone speechless — and tongueless.

Loud, rowdy and rude, not vox angelica at all, I remember an old professor pal of mine saying to this type who had invaded our table in Lamu one evening, “So nice to see young girls having a time so boisterous. I mean, so very ladylike.” And it goes without saying they are exhibitionists and all dream of being models. With the space for magazine covers limited, they take nudie pictures and become self publishers on the Internet — not for notoriety, but for the sake of posterity and for future generations.

So we go back full circle. What became of Valerie and the mzungu boy? As it turned out, she is in a Nairobi campus, and she was his lass for Lover’s Friday because as she put it, “My mzee is taking his wife out for dinner today, but kesho (last Saturday) he is taking me to Masaku to see the park, then Sunday is his family day, as always.”