Mermaid dances

There's a restaurant on Main Street in Santa Monica that takes you in with a dark warm glittering welcome. Its old style seafood-house decor is wrapped everywhere with multicolored twinkle lights. They have a good happy hour at the bar, or you can sit down for table service.

You slide into the embrace of a red vinyl booth, and relax. The waitress brings your drinks.

The cocktail napkins are politically incorrect.

Here's how they serve the martini olives.

The food is good old American classic. The steaks are pretty good, and so's the seafood. Garlic mashed potatoes and spinach round out a fine meal. It's always good to eat seafood in a restaurant that features portholes for windows.

And mermaids.




Flipping mermaids.

Mermaid of the Pacific

On Breed Street, just north of Cesar Chavez Boulevard, by the entrance to the Bank of America parking lot, a taco truck named La Sirena del Pacifico is parked. It specializes in seafood, or mariscos. On the front of the truck, a sign describes the seafood as prepared in the style of Colima.

Colima is a small state on the Pacific coast of Mexico, with great beaches for surfing, mountains, forests and parks, and the most active volcano in Mexico. Its city Manzanillo is Mexico's principle deep-sea port, handling international shipping - and it is an important fishing port as well.

Here, a shapely and beautiful mermaid, wearing a pink bikini top and a strand of pearls, displays a platter of fish tacos, as she lounges on the beach beneath a couple of coconut palms. Her muscular fish-tail with its large fins gives a sense of the power of this sea-siren.

Mermaids appear in folktales and legends of almost all the worlds cultures, from the Assyrian half-fish goddess Atagaris, to the mermaids of the cold Baltic Sea. In France they tell of the fairy Melusine, half woman half serpent. In Java there are legends of a mermaid queen, Nyi Roro Kidul and the Japanese tell stories of the ningyo, human-faced sea creatures. Gorgons or sirens appear in Greek mythology and the story of Odysseus.

The figure of a mermaid or La Sirena is a powerful one in the culture of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Africa. Brought by slave traders and merchant seamen, she is Mami Wata, the mother water of West Africa, who inhabits rivers and seduces fishermen and boatmen. Her image in popular culture has been shaped by a variety of sources. 16th century African artists and craftsmen saw the female figureheads of European sailing ships, and adapted the ideas to depictions of their own female water spirits. A German circus printed chromo-lithographs of a Samoan woman who had a snake-charming act - this image traveled back to Africa and shaped later images of Mami Wata. Indian immigrants to Africa brought pictures of Hindu gods that also influenced the way she was depicted.

She is Yemaya, the Yoruba mother-goddess of the ocean In Brazil she is Yemanja, celebrated by fishermen as the Queen of the Ocean. Sometimes a fish, and sometimes a scaled snake, she is Santa Marta la Dominadora, the saint who tamed a dragon. She appears in Mexican loteria cards as The Siren, and as an image for marketing.

She appears in many places, even unexpected ones.

She is powerful, sensual, seductive. Vain, she often carries a hand mirror to gaze into - or wears a pretty necklace, like our taco-truck mermaid.

But enough of this. Let's eat.

I love stepping underneath the blue shade of an unfolded awning of a taco truck, and looking up at the order window and the menu. La Sirena del Pacifico's menu offered a wide variety of seafood. There were cocktails of shrimp, octopus, clams, oysters, abalone, and campechana, or mixed seafood cocktails. There were fish or shrimp tacos, seafood soup, and tostadas with ceviche or shrimp or a mixture of both.


I ordered a taco de camaron - it was only $3.00, and I asked the proprietor if I could take pictures of his truck's paintings while I waited.

As I waited I realized how hungry I was - I had spent the day exploring, without stopping for lunch. When I got my taco, I took it to my car and opened up the styrofoam clamshell right there in the driver's seat. It smelled wonderful!

A thick blanket of crema mixed with a salsa rojo was spread over the shrimp and chopped cabbage that were nestled there on top of two corn tortillas. I squeezed a little lime on it, and stuck my fork through the sauce and brought up a shrimp.

They were perfect-sized shrimp - not too tiny, and not too big. Nicely breaded and freshly fried - they were still hot to the tongue and with a gritty bite, the fried cornmeal breading just starting to soak up the chile-laced crema and the lime juice. The cabbage was sweet and crunchy, a perfect contrast to the hot shrimp.

There must have been at least ten shrimp on my $3 taco. It was absolutely delicious!! I sat there in the parking lot, in my car, and ate, savoring each bite of fried shrimp, each creamy forkful of cabbage. Yum.

If you hear La Sirena singing alluringly to you - think about it. She may be serving tacos. That kind of enchantment is worth it.

Topanga Mermaid

If you're going south through Topanga, along Topanga Canyon Boulevard, just before the road to the elementary school is the former site of a plant nursery. At the driveway to the property is a huge, rambling and thorny rosebush, remarkably vigorous, with large single yellow flowers.

Like many old and species roses, it blooms only periodically throughout the year, in spring and early summer, and then perhaps again a flush of bloom in the fall.

The other day while commuting to work, I noticed it is in its fall bloom. I am not certain, but I believe that this is a specimen of the famed rose "Mermaid," beloved of English gardeners like Graham Stuart Thomas and Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West.

There's another Mermaid that makes her home in Topanga. In a quiet neighborhood, a house with an amazing history has become a welcoming gathering place for community events. Built in 1930 as a country club for a real estate development, it has been a brothel and casino, a school for boys, an American Legion Hall, and a gay nightclub.

The Topanga Historical Society has published a fantastic book - now out of print, but they're working on the new edition - that details the community's history and its tradition of bohemian lifestyles.

In the 1970's, the structure became the Mermaid Tavern, named after Shakespeare's Mermaid, and became a place for music, art, and legendary partying. Beatnik artist Wallace Berman exhibited there in 1973. Joni Mitchell sings about the Mermaid Tavern in her song "Carey,"

"Come on down to the Mermaid Cafe and I will
Buy you a bottle of wine
And we'll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down"

In 1989 the building was bought by someone who fell in love with it, who began a painstaking - and often heartbreaking - restoration. You can read about it at the owner's website - take heed, all who dream of restoring an historic building. But there is a happy ending. Today the Mermaid is a beautiful event and location venue, the owner often donating the space to local community fundraisers, celebrations, and memorial gatherings.

I'm relatively new to Topanga and Los Angeles. I was still in school when Topanga Canyon was the Mecca of hippie culture, when musicians like Neil Young built their studios among the oaks, and Charles Manson and his followers acted upon their dark impulses. As in many communities, the traces of the past fade and disappear over time - or knowledge and memory of them fade.

Also visible along Topanga Canyon Boulevard, but hidden so you have to look for it, is a trace of the past. Just north of the vintage shop Hidden Treasures, on the hillside among a tangle of shrubs, is an old wooden sign.

You can just see it when you come around the bend, or when you're pausing for our new traffic light to change.

A mermaid - with a lusty appetite for a hefty tankard of drink. She flips her tail in celebration. You can just imagine her, swimming topless in the Mermaid's pool while the music plays and the marijuana smoke rises.

Is this the old sign from the Mermaid Tavern? I don't know, but I suspect so. After all, how many mermaids do you suppose a place like Topanga might have?

Did any of you hang out in Topanga Canyon, at the Mermaid Tavern? If so, please share your stories.