By cliff_switzer@hotmail.com
Date: 17 December 1999

The Rose

          She had them on stage with her.  A dozen long-stemmed white roses.  

They were beautiful.  Tiffany came out from behind the curtain and walked 

across the stage.  Her blond hair hung to her calves in a long braid.  She 

smiled as took the mike, and for a brief moment,  rhythmically set the braid 

into motion.  Then she started singing.  It was spellbinding.  She wasn't a 

star yet, but she was special.  And everyone in the audience knew it.


          She was the same girl I'd known in Sioux City, Iowa.  Her huge brown 

eyes still mesmerizing, and even from  the back of the Cabaret, her  

honey-sweet sparkle inflamed me.  I guess that's why it was best we'd never 

gotten together.

          She was petite.  A knock-em-dead strawberry blond.  But even as tiny 

as she was, she could belt the tunes across the room.  Lord, I 

loved her.  I listened to her until she took her first break.  I was still 

unsure, and I left the crowded Cabaret to take a walk in the cool, thick fog of 


the Sonoma-summer air.



          That's where I saw the flyer.  Walking.  I walk a lot, and it was 

over on the campus when I saw the notice.  The Cotati Cabaret had more tunes 

for us, and I would have walked right by if I hadn't seen Tiffany Kirchner in 

big black letters.  She and her band were playing the Cotati Cabaret, and I 

couldn't believe it.  I hadn't been in Iowa for ten years.  I knew she had 

lived in California once, but I though she'd still be in Iowa.  She'd been so 

shy.



          Me?  I live in Sonoma Grove.  The last vestige of Sonoma State's 

humanist psychology, peace and love garbage.  The Grove, the beautiful grove 

where flower children once practiced their stuff, now belonged to 

transvestites, perverts, drunks, welfare queens and poets.   We all lived in 

the rundown trailers because we couldn't afford to live anywhere else.  Hey.  I 

know.  I'm sixty-years-old.  But hey, we all have our dreams.  And so 

this night I left my wine and my writing, the cross-dressers and the cats and 

the dogs, to take a long walk into Cotati.   And there she was.  The only woman 

I had ever fallen in love with.  It was heaven.  And I wasn't even in Iowa.