The Cactus Rose Lounge seats about a hundred and ten if the fire marshal isn't looking, and at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday it holds maybe forty. The carpet is the color of a bruise. The air conditioning hums a half-step below the key of everything Dana sings, which she noticed her second week and has been unable to un-hear for six years.
She opens with "Fever," because the afternoon crowd wants songs they already own. A man near the front is eating a shrimp cocktail out of a plastic cup shaped like a smaller plastic cup. Two women in matching visors are splitting a daiquiri and talking through the first verse, the second verse, and most of the bridge. A slot machine in the doorway makes its noise, which is the noise of coins that no longer exist.
Dana is good. This is not in question, and it is also not the point. She hits the note at the end of "At Last" that most lounge singers slide around, and she hits it clean, and one table applauds and one man raises his beer at her the way you'd wave at a neighbor whose name you can't remember.
After the set, the shrimp cocktail man catches her by the little rope that separates the stage from the casino floor. He is sunburned in the pattern of a man who fell asleep in one specific chair.
"Hey, not bad," he says. "Not bad at all. You've got a real voice on you."
"Thank you."
"You keep at it." He points at her with the cocktail fork, warmly, the way people point when they're giving you something. "Keep grinding. I'm serious. You keep working like that, maybe one day you'll be in one of the big shows. The real ones. Down at the—" he gestures at the Strip in general, at all of it. "You never know."
"You never know," Dana agrees.
He seems pleased with the exchange. He has done a kindness. He will remember it on the plane home, briefly, as evidence of the kind of person he is.
Dana clocks out at 3:40. Her call time at the Meridian Theater is 6:00.