It takes more than a new skirt to mambo with the crowd at Pipo's on Davis Islands. By RhondaK All summer I called on La Lupe, my new patron saint, to help me dance. La Lupe was Latin singer Victoria Raymond Joli. Her performances were legendarily controversial. She'd beat herself and her band, tear her clothes, laugh, cry and yes, sing. La Lupe ripped through meringues, bossa novas, son montunos with a fiery knowing. I wanted to dance as the Diva of Melodrama lived. After nearly a decade of haunting Goth clubs up the East Coast, this summer I found myself at La Brisas Cocktails y Tapas Courtyard at Pipo's in downtown Davis Islands. I realized that my pseudo-voguing, half-ass belly dance moves, so perfect for a riveting dirge by the Cure, were not suitable for this place.

Pipo's owner Danny Hernandez took a chance on this spot at the southwest corner of Davis and Biscayne boulevards that has swallowed many ambitious restaurants. Now called La Brisas Cocktails y Tapas Courtyard and La Feunte Catering, the place celebrated its first anniversary in October.

"I wanted a place my parents could come dance to the authentic Cuban music," said the animated Hernandez at one very happy hour. Hernandez and his brother had carried bags of rice and beans, helping their Cuban-born parents run their restaurant, the original Pipo's & Sons Restaurant, opened in 1979, on Hillsborough Avenue. Working anything less than 70 hours a weeks feels like a vacation to him.

"I let Freddie handle the music," Hernandez says with a smile. "He's my music director."

To say Freddy Montes is your music director is roughly similar to stating that Dale Earnhardt Jr. is your chauffeur. The Montes family reaches deeply into Cuba to a legacy of classically trained musicians. As a child, Montes would wake to his father playing everything from Chopin to boleros. His grandfather was the music director of Havana's infamous Tropicana nightclub.

I'd found a fondness for mojitos, a concoction of lime, sugar, rum, soda and bruised mint leaves. I secretly believed it would teach me how to cha-cha-cha.

I spent most of my summer listening to Freddie Montes and Su Sazon (Spice). Montes came from Cuba in 1985. His band consists of a violin, congas, bongo, guitar, drum/timbales, two trumpets and a piano. The musicians are resplendent in the traditional, crisp white guayabera shirts, black pants, gold jewelry and slick white patent-leather shoes.

As they played, I willed my feet to move. Sometimes it was my ears that stopped me. Something in Montes' voice recalled an old radio signal from far away. Others were more properly animated by the polyrhythmic richness of a small country that has exported so many rhythms.

One Friday, I convinced myself I could dance if I had the right skirt. With white flowers in my hair and a floor-length ruffled skirt, I advanced upon the night with a new attitude. As it began to rain, the band heated up. The cross-generation, multiracial crowd did not stop dancing. In fact, they turned their faces to the sky. My skirt needed a mojito. In fact, it needed about three.

But I still couldn't dance. I was transfixed by those who danced in a way that made the Old World new again. Transfixed by an 11-year-old girl dancing with her father and a 70-year-old man wearing a Fedora and moving like I never could with a middle-aged woman in a low-cut sequined dress.

Montes calls his music communication. One night in the parking lot, he took on Tony Jackson, a local percussionist who wanted help on some rhythms. Montes beat out a rhythm on the side of my truck. Jackson followed tentatively. They played off each other again and again, until my Dodge Ram shuddered like a Detroit-style conga drum.

My truck could dance, as I could not.

To say "salsa" to Montes is to get a lecture in Cuban music. To use the term "Afro-Cuban jazz" is too, somewhat reckless. "You can call it "hamburger,'" he says. "Salsa is a made-up phrase to cover a complex and historic music."

Admittedly, my summer of salsa was hamburger. I never did find my mambo in the bottom of a mojito. But by spending my mojito money on dance lessons, I may find myself by the fountain yet; arms in the air, feeling Cuba, Spain and Africa in the soft night air.

La Brisas/Pipo's is at 238 Davis Blvd. E., Davis Islands. Freddie Montes performs every Friday and Saturday night. The crowd is usually thick around 8 p.m. or so.

This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2001.