It was purely on a whim — to leave the house in the light drizzle. But it felt like the right thing to do on a Saturday night. The Uber deposited me by the roadside, where a clutch of cars were parked outside the new Pitstop, which had moved further down Nairobi's Langata Road.
It was a Pitstop 2.0 for sure: bigger and better, an upgrade from the previous tent. [I miss it] And it was spilling with Rhumba lovers. Of course, I couldn’t find a table or a seat. I stood around for so long with my whisky in hand I almost grew roots.
As luck would have it, I spotted a man swiping on a PDQ machine and grabbed his table just in time. I had texted an old friend of mine who lives in the neighbourhood; she showed up not long after, looked around and said, “I think I’m overdressed.”
She wore a sweater dress and knee-high leather boots. I said, “I can bet everybody here will disagree.” My cousin later joined us — with his biceps. [He recently resumed the gym.] Now we had a quorum because nobody listens to Rhumba alone. Nostalgia is only sweet when shared.
The night, it turned out, wasn’t what I thought it would be; the deejay failed to rise to the occasion. He fumbled and stumbled. For the first time I’ve been to Pitstop, I felt defeated by the music — which is telling if you know anything about the legend of Pitstop’s sound.
I have a playlist on my Spotify, purely curated from Shazaming songs at Pitstop in Nairobi and Kisumu over the years. It has almost 1,000 songs. I didn’t feel inspired to Shazam a single track that night. That’s the kind of night it was.
The service was equally dismal. No matter how frantically the waiters worked, they just couldn’t cope with the demand. They were drowning.
Just after midnight, we stood in the cold, wet night and waited for our Ubers.
“Your outfit, it turns out, was the best thing about tonight,” I told my friend.
