The Line of Dance Is a Circle

[New Year’s Eve: Two years to the day after starting this blog.]

Only connect.
Howard’s End, E.M. Forester


I had great plans for this year. Great plans!

This year would be the Year of Connection. What can be more tango than that?

All year long I touched on what it means to connect.

my hips
my muscles
the many myths of my one body

many teachers, disciplines, styles underlain by a continuous thread,
one teacher, Grisha

the Denver tango community, unbeknownst even to itself, one
larger than the sum of its contentious parts,
in context global and historic, immediate and ethereal

composers and singers, rhythm and tune, the bandaneon
Fresedo and Canaro and the Communist Pugliese
resolved in the beat of one lead’s heart

lovely Comme il Faut shoes duct-taped,
one prayer to hold them together until a new pair can be found

old wood and moguls, the floor of the Merc,
gossip and small talk, Kari's laugh

The Five: Glenlivet, Stan, Tom, Andrey, Mark
plus one: The Mathematician

The Man on the Wall
My Deep-Thinking Friend
each one of them one of a kind

Argentina, its soul

my family, sisters, brother, father, mother
their stories, the story we are making together

my solitude

my story

my one heart

Look to the right, read the section headed “Only Connect.” It’s a catalog.

I meant to run through the catalog. I meant to connect the dots. I had a plan, a sketchy outline. I meant to write like crazy through the last twelve weeks of the year.

I was right on track. I had created a story arc, I had set up the ending. All that remained was to gather it all together with BrillianceMeaningTruthBeautyLight.

In the face of such a task, there are only two things a writer can do: drink or lie.

This is memoir. Lying is out.

Here’s a true story:

Shortly after Barbara died, I asked her husband, as he was cleaning out her things, to send something of hers to me. It’s a little creepy, this drive we have, to hold onto the dead. In Victorian times, the survivors cut the hair of their loved ones and wove funeral wreaths. They were not rough mementoes, they were décor: sophisticated and intricate showpieces.

I didn’t want Barbara’s hair. I wanted a talisman (n., from the Greek consecration).

He sent a red sweater. I had one just like it. I had bought the sweaters a year before. Barbara would wear hers on the East Coast and I would wear mine in the Rocky Mountains. It didn’t turn out to be as woo-woo meaningful as I had hoped.

I stuck the sweater in a drawer. Next summer, when Keith and I went camping, I wore it. We were cozy around the campfire when a coal burst. A cinder landed on my shoulder and burned a hole the size of a silver dollar.

I tried to cauterize the hole. I tried to rejoin the threads. But you cannot keep a damaged knit from unraveling. With every move I made, the weave came more undone.

It hurt to watch the hole grow large, ragged. Soon I threw the sweater away. It was not a big moment; I had no emotional attachment.

Barbara once asked: Do you ever want it all to connect?

I do.

I live in solitude, not in isolation. I want it all to connect in ways that are unseen and mysterious and cosmic and in ways that are immediate and earthy. I don’t need a god’s master plan, I only wish to believe that when a thread is plucked, the whole web goes ping!

But.

It does not matter what I want. As the song goes: Life comes together and it comes apart.

Tonight as I practice with Glenlivet, I tell him all of this.

“So that’s it,” I say. “I’m going to end the blog by saying it’s all just a big, unraveled mess.”

We laugh, and then he stops laughing. An idea is forming, he is going to think it aloud. It takes but a second. He pronounces it with certainty:

“It does all connect,” he says. “In you.”

in my one heart
dancing

How Visiting Your Family Warps Your Brain

News from the Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience via the Discovery channel (and yes, that's the real headline):

"We like to be around people that look more like us, but we do not find them as sexually attractive," added Platek, editor-in-chief of the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. "I think it is linked to our subconscious ability to detect facial resemblances so we avoid lusting after those that may be related to us."

Read more.

Archaeologists Discover Demolished Remains of Cafe De Hansen, Famed Cradle of Argentine Tango

A group of archaeologists found the remains of the Cafe de Hansen, one of the birthplaces of the tango, which thrived in Buenos Aires from the end of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th and has been named both in chronicles of the times and in lyrics of Argentina's most typical music.

The culture minister of the Buenos Aires municipal government, Hernan Lombardi, told the daily Clarin on Saturday that experts had found part of the brick flooring of the mythical cafe 50 centimeters (20 inches) underground in Palermo Park on the city's north side.

The cafe was demolished in 1912 to make way for roadworks.

Read the full story.

* * *

La Troileana

(From Lahontan [Nevada] Valley News)

Another recent and recommended release is “Troileana” (World Village/Harmonia Mundi) by Liliana Barrios.

Barrios was awarded the Gardel Prize — the equivalent of the “Tango Grammy” — in 2005 and this release is a celebration of the music of Anibal Troilo, one of the foremost composers of Argentine tango’s golden age, and the first album to be dedicated exclusively to his music.

Troilo was a student of Gardel’s as well as the mentor of Astor Piazzola, and his pieces are very much the essence of the Argentine tango tradition.

Her vocals are accompanied by two bandeons, (some excellent playing by Walter Rios) two pianos and a string trio; the music is magnetic and demanding.

Barrios has maintained that tango-song is unique in that it is felt through the music, imagined in the lyrics and danced by our feet. The lyrics (all in Spanish) are dynamic evocations of lived experiences, which can be typified by her inclusion of two versions of “La Ultima Curda” (The Last Binge),” that National Tango Hymn.

Her expressive voice is well-suited for this material. True to the emotive nature of tango, its heights and depths of feeling, her expressive voice takes us on a roller coaster ride of joy and sadness, lust and despair.

* * *

Buenos Aires Gets Tango Monument
They say it is the first time any city or country has honoured a style of music in this way. Read more.

What Is Lonely?

When it is Friday night and all of your tango friends are at the Merc dancing and you are for the fifth day in a row bedridden with flu.

[When you are little kid who has made up the funniest pun in the world and nobody laughs, no matter how many times you repeat it, jumping up and down in frenzied excitement at what you have seen, peeking through a tear in the thick canvas tent, the word circus!, where words fly the trapeze and juggle and tumble out of tiny cars and make elephants balance on brightly colored balls, and ride bareback on ponies, shouting “Get it? Get it?”

When you are lying in your bedroll on a broad prairie beneath the indifferent firmament with a cold, dew-soaked dawn coming on, growing old.

When the week before Christmas your best friend, so frail she is nearly transparent in a stranger’s tattered, hand-me-down nightgown, climbs through a maze of filthy junk, the leavings of too many transient predecessors, in the unlit basement of a wreck of a house, calling in a starving, angelic voice that could still sing beautifully if only she could, calling for her lost kitten, when she says, to protect you from falling in the dark, “Stay back, you can't come with me.”]

When, making the best of the flu, snuggled in the dark, the cozy burden of double-knit afghan pinning your every curve and angle to down cushions, steaming cup close at hand, narrow light trained on your lap, you open a book

that breaches all your readerly/writerly walls, walks right up to the palace of your heart, with one confident finger reaches out and rings the bell. Every jaunty word sings vibrato, all of the palace doors fling themselves open, the jugglers and elephants and trapeze artists and bareback riders flood the square ... and it is all so peculiar you cannot think of one other person to share it with.

If the word circus came to town and nobody bought a ticket ...

Writers need readers.

Suddenly you are lonely, so lonely you must behave rashly, must set the book aside and shout into the void studded with nodes as the indifferent firmament is studded with stars:

Hey! Read this!

Whale Season, by N.M. Kelby.

Tango Serendipity

Tango Lovers Dance in the Streets of Buenos Aires last Saturday...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7770374.stm

... same day as the Tango Colorado Holiday Ball!

How much fun is that?

How did they know...?!

Tango Colorado Holiday Ball

Tonight is the Tango Colorado holiday dance. I am breaking feminine rules and wearing the same dress as last year. It has a glittery, silver bodice with a floor-length silver-gray taffeta skirt. It is as beautiful as the day it was made, some 40 years ago.

What a difference one year makes! Last year I couldn’t dance very well. This year, coming off Fandango de Tango, I feel like All That.

I am a good, solid intermediate. After spending one year at the bottom of the beginner class and one year clawing my way out, this feels like a million bucks!

What about my dad? This time last year he was suffering from cancer, huddled under blankets and shivering in the aftermath of his chemotherapy.

This year he is well. He has a clean bill of health. The cancer may come back, but it is quite treatable.

Too bad he recently lost his medical insurance. Now his pension ison the chopping block. In the absence of union contracts, what The Company giveth it may freely taketh away. Do not say one word to me about the logic that requires corporate investors to starve the geese that lay their golden eggs for them.

Clouds are massing on the horizon. I expect a Perfect Storm. I am battening down my hatches. Next year I may need to cut back on tango. Next year we all may.

Still.

Glenlivet has just taken a loft with a huge dance space. He intends to give only one tango party, he tells me: It started last weekend and ends on the day he dies. I love Glenlivet.

Kari called a few hours ago to tell me to save her a prime seat at the holiday party tonight. She wants a seat right on the dance floor. We will chat between dances all night. I love that!

Right this minute I must leave for the holiday ball. I am to help with the cooking. I love to cook for a crowd!

Next week I dance with Grisha in a student showcase for my family at Patricia’s house party. I love Patricia’s house parties; I love dancing with Grisha; I love showing off for my family!

All of this fun, all of this love! How lucky is that?

How much more is this: I am a writer with readers.

I kneel and kiss the ground.

Let’s dance!

Fandango de Tango Looking Back 4

Lesson 4
Steps

Taking eighteen classes in five days, you’re bound to learn a step or two. That’s how many combinations I memorized: two.

But that’s not the point. I never go to class to learn combinations; I go to do them. Sometimes, being dragged through the paces, I wonder why I bother.

Fabian Salas explains…

The idea that a follower can blindly follow any step is a fiction. Remember when you were a beginner, learning the cross?

No, Fabian says, a follower is like a computer. First you need to download the software, then you can use it.

There’s something offensive in his simile, I suspect, but his point is well taken: If a follower doesn’t know how to execute a move, or if a lead asks her to do something foreign or nonsensical to her, chances are she won’t get it right. She’ll resist it or do it badly.

Think of volcada. What follower in her right mind would go along with that?

I am a pretty good follower, and I still can’t respond to the lead to step forward into the man’s step. Stan does it often when we practice, and I never get it right on the first try. Might a class help?

A class gives a follower technique to use in executing a step. The concentrated repetition with many leads forces the follower to develop sensitivity to the lead’s cue regardless of how it is executed. Most important, a class gives the follower permission to take the unfamiliar, perhaps uncomfortable, step.

Yes that’s right, the teacher reassures her. With every repetition, the follower gains sensitivity to the cue and refines her execution.

By the time class ends, the follower has filed both the cue and the move in her muscle memory. A few sessions at home with a broom or a partner, and she’s ready to take her cool new move public!

In a milonga, a considerate lead gives a follower only two or three chances to pick up on a cue. Then he spares her the misery of missing the step. I never want to miss a lead’s cue. Far better to go to class (18 classes in 5 days!) and be dragged through the paces umpteen clumsy times, so when the move comes up in milonga, I’m ready.

Don’t ask me what steps I learned at Fandango de Tango. Lead me and I’ll show you.

Fandango de Tango Looking Back 3

Lesson 3
Cabeceo!

I’ve been an abject failure at cabeceo. I don’t like it; it’s terribly brash. One does not look at another person; that’s presumptuous. And a prolonged stare across a room? That’s brazen. Am I supposed to behave as if I am interested? I think not!

That’s been my thinking, but now it has taken a turn. Apparently, despite my objections, I have been practicing this little trick. In Austin I learned: If you want it bad enough, you can make the cabeceo work.

My first cabeceo was born of necessity and not on the dance floor: I knocked over a glass of water. A waiter was scanning the room. I caught his eye, held my breath and held onto the look. In a Texas two-step, he was there, tidying up.

Whoa. Seriously. That’s like having a superhero gaze of power!

By the last night’s milonga, I was cabeceo-ing left and right. I followed all the rules I learned from Barbara Durr at the Denver festival last spring. During cortinas, I returned to my chair, sat up straight, and scanned the room with lively interest.

Yikes! Strangers looked back at me! Doubleyikes! We danced!

It felt brazen. It felt like: Here I am, bring it on! I got away with it because I knew no one. Being in a roomful of strangers affects me strongly, one way or another: sends me scurrying for cover or makes me fearless. This week it was fearless. Go figure.

Now that I have returned home, will it stick? I don’t think so. I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a roving eye, always on the lookout for the next opportunity. I like to be the kind of person who is happy with what is close at hand. I like to go unnoticed, or to be noticed by few. I like to be approached and to accept invitations. I do not like to put myself out there for the taking, nor challenge men to bring it on.

On the other hand…

I often use the technique of cabeceo in reverse, to preempt invitations to dance. It is easy to choose a strategic moment to fuss with the shoes or sip tea.

I like to dance, and I like certain leads very much, and after about one year of preparation, had good success in floating a suggestion of interest to The Mathematician.

I like to not dance, I like to dance. It may be that cabeceo offers just what I need: a way to go unnoticed … until I want to be seen.

Fandango de Tango Looking Back 2

Lesson 2

When a woman dances in such a way that a man is inspired to shower her with gifts, she has hit her stride as a tanguera.

After two lovely tandas at the Thanksgiving Brunch milonga, The Gentleman from Austin took my hand. “I want to give you gifts so you’ll remember my name!” he said urgently.

Cool! I said, or words to that effect.

Four days later, at the last-night’s farewell milonga, he gave me: a Tosca CD and a Got Gancho? T-shirt. And three lovely tandas, politely spaced over the course of the night.

How cool is that?

Fandango de Tango: Looking Back 1

It’s been a week since the start of Fandango de Tango. What have I learned?

Elegant lady and hard-working Joe make a lovely pair. Witness my shoes: Comme il Faut held together with duct tape.

It’s true! Four days before I boarded the plane for Austin, I caught my heel and tore the leather cross strap on my only pair of tango shoes. They have been on their last legs for nearly a year; the straps have already been replaced twice in the past two months.

I have been shopping in three states, to no avail. Shoes for big, deformed feet are hard to come by.

For six weeks, my goal was to nurse the sandals through Fandango de Tango, and hope to buy new shoes there. Keith’s finesse with duct tape made the repair invisible; through the whole festival, no one was the wiser.

And, the grand prize: The shoe vendor at Fandango de Tango who will take a photo of my poor old sandals and have an identical pair made. I covet the Comme il Faut name, but at this point any wearable shoe will be just fine.

Fandango de Tango Day 5: Texas Chain Saw Tanda

One of the nice things about festivals is that you meet people. Like so:

You work with a guy in class. Maybe he is a beginner and not so accomplished as the other guys. So what? He has a nice presence. Gentle.

You see him at the milonga. Ricardo, the festival organizer, has announced that ladies are free to ask the gentlemen to dance. You ask. He looks alarmed, but he is a good sport.

Next day ... turns out, he's that. I am not speaking metaphorically. Check out his website: leatherface2.com.

Fandango de Tango Only in Texas

Pablo Pugliese is explaining how to do boleo, and he is drawing on the whip analogy. A man in the class, a big man, slowly draws a bandana out of his pocket, begins smoothing it in a ring he makes of thumb and forefinger.

When Pablo is done, the big man, shy, raises his hand.

Pablo raises his eyebrows.

I did the bullwhip, he says. It works like this. He snaps the bandana. It is nothing like a whip, it is too floatiy to snap. Never mind. He gives it a few tries, and people nod. This class is full of Texans.

Pablo nods. Apparently he has had experience with whips, or the snap of a wet towel. Later, he uses the analogy of the bandana to make a point. I like Pablo.

* * *

THERE IS NO CHOCOLATE! Apparently, in this state, the term "black gold" means something else.

* * *

Fandango de Tango: Day 5

Last morning blues. Everyone is dragging butt. We are all determinedly upbeat, but we are drragging butt. Last night the milonga lasted until 5 a.m, and classes today start at 1.

This morning when I walked into the restaurant for breakfast, I asked the waitress to seat me in a corner somewhere. I didn't care iif it was a corner of the kitchen, as long as there weren't any tango folks in sight.

She gave me a knowing look. She is fed up with us too.

We are all in endurance mode. the goal today is to just get through it. Over the days we have become famliar with certain partners, and we look at them with relief. It is good to be in the same boat.

Last day. We are in endurance mode,

We are already looking forward to next year.

Grin.

Fandango de Tango: Day 5

Festivals are great for meeting new people: This weekend, I met Carmen and Lisa, members of Tango Colorado.

Fandango de Tango, Day 4 Postscript

I would just like to say this: If you come to this festival, bring a lot of chocolate. There is NO FOOD available after 11 p.m. Not even a vending machine.

From where I am sitting , I can see through the glass doors of Morsels, the little food store in the hotel lobby. It is locked up tight. I am seriously thinking about becoming a burgler.

Fandango de Tango: Day 4

This is brutal. Classes all day and milongas at night, with little break between. There is not enough time to eat or sleep. What are these organizers thinking? This is a tango-maniac’s festival.

Grin.

This Is Not About Punctuality

I arrive at the Merc at 11 p.m. Stan points to his watch. He’s been there since the music started at 9.

We agree to meet tomorrow at the Turn to warm-up. “Music starts at 7:30,” he says. I usually arrive about 8:45.

Saturday night I arrived at Patricia’s party shortly after 11. “You’ve been here since she opened the door, haven’t you?” I ask. He nods happily.

The hardest thing about tango, Stan says, is waiting for it to begin.

Good Grief 3x

I don’t do parties. Nevertheless, I am here.

I am not enamored of the idea of practice partners. Nevertheless, I say to Glenlivet, “I would like to practice with you.”

He hands me his card.

The Problem with Partners, Part 4

First, he will want to exchange contact information. Your real name—first AND last—so he can put it into his interlocking phonePDAbuddylistemailtextmessagingFacebookMac system. “Just in case.”

In case of what? In case he can’t make it to class? What difference does it make? Who skips class because their partner can’t make it? Not me. I go to class. I can handle odd-woman-out status. Not to brag, but I’m pretty good at it. Show or no show…I’m happy.

He will insist on giving you his business card. Do not let it flutter from your fingers--that is littering. Also, he’s watching. Watch him. When you slip it into your wallet, he smiles.

If he is running late or must miss a class, he will call you. He expects you to do the same for him. Now you do not have a class partner, now you have an obligation.

Courtesy won’t kill you, my mother used to say when she was still the boss of me.
But what function does it serve? If I am going to the class anyway, do I need to know who else is going to be there? The information does not influence my actions.

It won’t kill you, she says.

It’s a mystery. What makes people need and want and behave as they do? Don’t ask. This is why we have rules of social behavior, so we don’t have to answer such questions on the fly. Take the phone call. It’s easier. And polite.

But it does sort of kill you. To the extent it impinges on your privacy, it does.

* * *

My wallet is adorable! It is red and just a little bit bigger than a dollar bill folded in half. Inside there are a few dollar bills, a credit card, two library cards, a gift card to the Tattered Cover, auto registration and insurance card, driver’s license.

On the outside of the wallet is a pocket just the size of a driver’s license. It is clear plastic, so you can easily prove your identity to merchants and police and agents of Homeland Security. Referencing the previous paragraph, you note that my driver’s license is inside the wallet. So what’s in the pocket?

Business cards: The Mathematician. Stan.

The Mathematician’s is on top; I see it each time I use the wallet.

Stan’s has dancing shoes on it. It is not really a business card. Tango is not his business, it is his …. what? It would be easy to say it is his life, but that’s overstating it. Hobby is too milquetoast a word, obsession and addiction too full of portent. What then? Tango is Stan’s habitat.

The Problem with Partners, Part 3

At practicas and milongas you can practice your technique on many different partners. This is useful. You learn to read lots of different leads and adapt to each one.

If you like to dance with many different leads, don’t commit to any one. Take classes from all the teachers, learn their various styles, then go home and work through them alone. Soon you will discover what works for your body. That’s your technique. Soon you will discover what suits you. That’s your style.

When you have trained broadly and have developed a solid base of technique, then you can dance with a milonguero-style or salon-style or nuevo-style or rank-beginner-style of lead, with grace.

If you like to dance with many different leads, you can’t be wedded to any one style. A practice partner will wed you to his style. How can it be otherwise? You spend all that time practicing together—and every mile you run on that track is a mile you’re not running on another.

* * *

If you want to try out having a regular partner, start with a workshop. You’ll soon discover whether you and this lead approach learning in the same way, whether you work well together when frustrated and struggling, whether you can get along when you are not at your best.

After the workshop, take stock: Did you help one another learn? Do you still like one another? If the answer is no, you’re in luck. The workshop is over, and you’re free!

If the answer is yes … you’re in more-better luck.

You would think that, with a record of being the odd woman out of rotation for hours on end, I might find a class partner useful. With a class partner, you never need worry about being the odd woman out. It is nice to have a skirt to hide behind, even if the skirt is a pair of pants.

Bah, humbug!

The first time someone hinted that I might consider partnering up for a class, I came down on the idea like a Sledge-o-matic. We took the class as free agents. In that class I met Andrey, one of The Five. If I’d had a partner for that class, would I have met Andrey? Would I have taken note?

No. When you hide behind something, it blocks your view.

I like a clear view, and the way courage feels.

The Problem with Partners, Part 2

Of course you must practice.

Nina tells her beginners this over and over: With daily practice you can learn to tango in just a few years; without practice, you’re on the 30-year plan.

The first-time beginners always laugh at that. Those of us who are repeating beginners for the third-fifth-twelfth time let them have their moment. We were laughing once, too.

You must practice. Of course.

* * *

When you are a rank beginner, it does not take two to tango. Rather, it does not take two people. When you are still trying to figure out how to stand up in your shoes, your best practice partner is a broom or a stick or a mirror or hope.

Or the face of a happy man drawn on the wall.

* * *

Eleven Perfect Steps

Here’s a practice you can do by yourself, adapted from Tom Stermitz’s walking exercise:

Walk backward the length of your practice space, then turn around and walk backward the way you came.

I don't like exercises; I like to play games. So I invented a game with only one rule: Every time I faltered, I would return to the starting line. No making it to the other end of the room until every step was perfect. My practice space is 11 steps long. Hence the name of the game.

Tango, how do I love thee? Let me count the

.
.
.

hours

.
.
.

days

.
.
.
weeks
.
.
.

months
.
.
.

years.

…for heaven’s sake!

For days I could not get out of arm’s reach of The Man on the Wall. One step, two thrrrr… bonk! All that scampering back to the starting line disrupted my concentration, I couldn’t get my groove on. It was discouraging, and threatened to become self-fulfilling; one step, two, thrrrr …bonk! could easily become the fixed pattern in my mind and muscles’memories.

So, I changed the game. Got rid of the rule. Now there is only an ideal, to take Eleven Perfect Steps.

Without the imperative to scamper back, the focus of the game changed. The rule had riveted my attention on each immediate step, each looming, imminent failure. Every step was prolonged torture--anticipating it, dreading it, recognizing it, and imposing the penalty for it. Pass or utter failure.

With the shift from rule to ideal, single steps lost their weighty import; succeed or fail, they are always in passing. An ideal is otherworldly; the measure of success is not attainment but attentive effort. Now I do not intend to achieve every step but to love each one, to be attentive, to be.

Did it work? Ha! I lurched and staggered, tumbled into the sofa, fell down on the floor.

When you hike a steep, tricky slope, it’s smart to keep three points on the ground—two feet plus one body part (for example, the hand). Who knew?! What works for mountain climbers works for tango, too.

For miles on end, I groped my way from table to sofa to bookshelf to wall. At first I held on for dear life, then to hold myself upright, then to steady myself. Eventually my fingers ran lightly across the surfaces of things. Eventually I realized--eureka!—the touch was reassuring but unnecessary.

Then came the toughest part of the game: weaning myself from reassurance. I knew I could walk unaided, but the gap between knowledge and trust is a wide chasm to cross. There is only one way to do it: keep walking.

I am a poet at heart. I love rhythm and repetition, a tiny aperture, tinkering, detail. I can practice Eleven Perfect Steps for up to two hours, subsumed in concentration.

I still practice Eleven Perfect Steps almost every day. I have yet to succeed with regularity. It still feels as much like a game of chance as a skill.

It feels that way, but I know better. I am learning: Every step is already inside you. Envision the step after the one you are taking, and the next and the next, the whole lovely sequence. Let the beauty you love be the thing that you do. Only walk.

* * *

To Eleven Perfect Steps, add these:

Bookshelf ochos. Turns around a stick. Doorframe boleos. Torso twisting. Elastic collection. Cool hip action. Adornments with a stick stuck in a shoe. Sit ups. Push ups. Balance exercises in the middle of the floor. Adornments in turns. Overturned ochos, moving down the floor. Enrosque. Why not?

You can do all these alone, or with props. No need for a partner, not yet.

* * *

Goofing Around

Practice this every day. You must! Every day put on the music that makes you feel free and do every goofy thing you like. This is self-expression.

I like chanson. Frank Sinatra. The Fresedo pieces that remind me of 1940s musicals. The 1940s musicals themselves. Big Bands. Swing. Motown. Norah Jones. Canaro. Celtic new age. Hammered dulcimer straight out of Appalachia. Pugliese.

During the holiday season: Eartha Kitt singing Santa Baby and Elvis singing Blue Christmas.

I run through all of Tom’s exercises: walking with the cross behind, cross before, the step for tight spaces. Then I move on:

Overturned ochos. GREAT BIG STEPS. Ronde de jambe. Pique. Enrosque. Sweeps. Taps with the heel and toe ... syncopated! Planeo. Boleo. Tendu all over the place. An old-fashioned milonga traspie. Soft shoe shuffle.

I am Ginger Rogers AND Fred Astaire!

* * *

Even in class, I like to practice alone. Sometimes when I am the extra woman, I do not even try to join the rotation. I go to a corner and practice. No matter what step the class is learning, a follower can use it to work on technique. I am a technique-geek, happy happy happy all by myself.

During a class last winter, Andrey marched over with a grim look on his face. He does not like to see me dancing alone. He believes it takes two to tango.

Eventually, it does.

The Problem with Partners, Part 1

I like to practice alone. Are you surprised?

Celebrating

Some people are in bars. Some at house parties. Hundreds of thousands are gathered in the streets, cheering.

In the lobby of the Turnverein, dancers take advantage of the cortinas to watch the election unfold. The small TV that sits behind the welcome desk is tuned to national coverage rather than the usual instructional videos.

It is my turn to work the desk when Mr. Obama goes over the top.

Cecile has been talking to the TV, urging voters not to disappoint the world. The organizer of the Turn is avoiding the area, looking disgruntled. When Mr. Obama goes over the 270 electoral college votes required to win the election, cheering erupts around the TV set.

Cecile makes a name tag that says in French "We won!" But people discourage her from wearing it into the ballroom. The entrance to the ballroom is a doorway into a different world. Politics stays in the lobby.

Congratulations to US.

Let's dance!

How It’s Done in BsA

From last Monday’s Tango Colorado listserv:

Hello Everybody:

I will be DJ'ing this Tuesday at the Turnverein starting at 7:30 …

It has been brought to my attention there has been some confusion as to what happens at a milonga (Salon) in BSAS. I thought for the first half I would play just what they play down there. Tandas, cortinas, and their version of alternative for a little over the first half of the dance.

I am very aware that Tango at the Turnverein is both a milonga and a practica. I am sure that the practica side of the room will find the music to be enjoyable, fun and full of energy.

Anyone that has questions, comments, concerns about my DJ'ing tomorrow. Please email me.

I will also take any complaints that happen to come to anyone's mind about the same subject as well.

TangoMan

* * *

To understand the last line, you have to know Tango Colorado: We’re a contentious bunch, and the conflicts often play out around the music played on Tuesday nights at the practica/milonga held in a very large ballroom, split down the middle by a row of tables, in a building call the Denver Turnverein.

From what I can gather, traditional means up to (and possibly through) Pugliese; alternative means anything post-Pugliese. There is some debate about where Mr. Pugliese should fall.

To settle arguments, both groups turn their eyes to BsA. The way to win an argument is to say your way is “how it’s done in BsA.” This poses a bit of a problem: Various people in Tango Colorado have visited or lived in various districts of BsA during various decades, and there is no consensus on how things are done there.

The good thing about a rocking boat is that eventually it comes to some sort of balance. Over time, TC has settled into a canon, a collection tango music that is generally accepted as acceptable. This is the music that is played during the early evening. The 1930s are quite popular, though daring DJs have been known to slip in a Pugliese or Piazzola. After 10 p.m., all bets are off.

DJs often post to the listserv to say something descriptive and sometimes defensive about the music they will play.

That’s why the impish TangoMan, David Hodgson, has decided to give us a taste of “how it’s done in BsA."

To put this in perspective, consider his siganture sign-off:

If you’re going to wreck a room. Wreck the room, do it well, have fun, and with a smile.

Because I am intrigued, and because it is possible for even the stirrer of a pot to feel unsure of what might ensue, I drop David a line:

Looking forward to it! I am going to pay attention to the music for a change. Normally I just like it all. (Follower’s good fortune—just have to dance, don’t have to think.)

When it comes to tango music I am a slobbering puppy. If I love all the music, I can learn to dance to all of it.

I do not want to be one who comes flouncing out of the ballroom, drops into the empty chair at the welcome desk to declare: You can’t dance to this! I like figuring things out. If I can’t dance to a certain kind of music, I want to practice until I can.

David responds :

O, have no doubt the first half will be quite obvious...

* * *

I am at the front desk, which means I have been at the Turn for about 90 minutes. Everything seems normal.

My shift is about half over when one of the TC teachers flounces out of the ballroom and drops into the spare chair in the lobby. He is cranky.

Most of the time, when someone flounces out of the ballroom, they just need a time out. You leave them alone, they regain their equilibrium and launch themselves back into the fray.

There is a cortina, some crazy thing. The DJs use the cortinas for self-expression. This is one of my favorite parts of tango. Then comes the—oh my goodness, it is not yet 10 p.m.!—alternative music.

What is this shit? the teacher explodes. He propels himself out of the chair, rockets across the ballroom, making straight for the DJ’s table.

I do not recognize the energy that prompts such sudden heat, nor the system of belief that fails to require a person to contain it. This is our well-documented national mental illness: self-indulgence. We do not control our impulses. We do not defer.

Still, as I idly watch the tantrum unfold, I smile. David has been into the esoteric side of martial arts for years; he knows how to take a person's energy in, transform it, and shoot it back out.

Easygoing is a not a personality trait, it's a skill.

The music goes on, the teacher storms out. I can't help but think that if he could have disciplined hiself to inaction, waited out his emotional burst, he could have enjoyed the rest of the evening.

I count the minutes until my shift is up, then dance the rest of the night. Nothing snags my attention. David said he would play "Tandas, cortinas, and their version of alternative for a little over the first half of the dance."

I have not figured out what makes the music tonight any more like BsA than any other night at the Turn. Is it the selection of songs, the order in which they are played? There was only one alternative tanda in early evening, the one that the teacher disliked. So what is it that makes tonight's music more like BsA than any other night?

At the end of the evening, I ask.

You don't know? David says.

Elvis.

I Have

I have

6 windows
1 balcony holding 1 chair
1 wall painted sage green

1 guitar in a battered case
1 songbook, battered

8 boxes notebooks and journals
4 boxes research notes

2 candles, clove and sandalwood

3 boxes Christmas décor
6 Christmas novels

1 pair winter boots
1 pair hiking boots
1 pair winter hiking boots
2 pair sneakers
2 pair casual shoes
2 pair dress shoes
2 pair so-so tango shoes
1 pair Comme il Faut

1 bed
1 pillow shaped like a chair
1 quilt

1 wooden rocking chair
1 down-stuffed sofa
1 simple old oak desk
1 modern office chair
1 bookshelf, 6 feet tall by 4 feet wide
2 boxes of books that won’t fit on the bookshelf
3 boxes of books too valuable to store on the bookshelf
2 boxes bound magazines, ca.1890
3 file cabinets
5 tables
3 lamps

2 boxes framed photos

3 library cards, battered and covered in stickers like well-traveled suitcases, each sticker allowing borrowing privileges from another library system
1 library card from the Library of Congress

1 beach rock with a hole in it, strung on cheap cord
1 wedding ring

1 packet love letters
1 packet letters from Michigan
1 packet letters from Barbara

1 toolbox, stocked
1 cell phone, mostly turned off uncharged lost

230 sq ft of practice space

31 tango tops
6 pair black tango pants
1 pair tight tango pants
1 pair tighter tango pants
1 pair very tight tango pants
2 tango skirts
2 tango dresses
2 holiday tango dresses
1 tango ball gown
1 pair skin-tight tango pants, too daring to wear
3 tops too daring to wear
2 skirts too daring to wear
3 dresses too daring to wear

1 laptop

* * *

To the extent that one’s possessions indicate one’s attachments and preoccupations, what is to be made of this inventory?

Every possession is a talisman, every one tells a story:

… the sofa, a family joke: Two-of-Six’s third or fourth purchase in her Goldilocks effort to find one that is just right

… the lamp that looks like the Eiffel tower: where Six-of-Six and I went all the way to the top despite his fear of heights

… all of the boots that I own: from Keith, along with thick socks and slippers, gifts for the holiday we dubbed The Christmas of Warm Feet

… framed photo of a country barn painted with a portrait of Baldasaare Castiglione, pale moon in a pale blue sky, winter weeds aglow in late afternoon light, captured by Michigan when he was still just a guy taking pictures

… scented candles by which I hand-write personal letters

… table purchased from Hilda, a Latvian woman who immigrated with nothing but diamonds sewed into the lining of her coat, which she used to purchase the building (next door to Keith’s house) containing the apartment she rented to me

… tango clothes purchased from thrift stores with the secret stories of their original owners still clinging

… skin-tight pants and belly-baring top, worn to perform (that term used loosely) with Glenlivet in a transitory hippie joint entered through a chiffon curtain leading onto the narrow space between two buildings, off an alley in a neighborhood where the only bright lights were the signs in the liquor store window … afterward worn to the Merc for a full 5 minutes before hurrying to the restroom to change into something modest

… almost-done quilt, single-bed size, 24 large squares printed with an intricate, fleur de lis design to be cross-stitched in royal blue, started at age 9, picked up and packed away over the course of 12 years, stitches solicited from summer-camp kids and friends and relatives, then quilted on the same small hoop through an unseasonably cold Arkansas winter, oven on full blast and its door wide open to heat the drafty place, quilt spread over the legs for warmth, in a trailer park on the banks of a country lake actually a wide spot in a river manmade to serve as the cooling pond for a nuclear reactor that the town lobbied hard to get because the tax money would allow the city to reopen its public schools, which had to close despite kids and parents begging door-to-door for money to pay the teachers’ salaries; and despite the jokes about glowing in the dark, the red lights atop the beaker-shaped cooling towers glow in a reassuring way, like nightlights through the bedroom window when the local radio station goes off-air at midnight

… guitar, songbook … a season of magic many years long, ending with Barbara

… mysterious hole in my arm that never goes away, possibly my personal kipuka

… scribbled poem that started it all at age 10 in the dead of night upon being jerked out of sleep by a beckoning idea that could not be followed in dreams but only chased down with feverish pencil … match to tinder, my holy spirit burst into flame


The door to my apartment opens on Wonderland. The space itself greets me. Every possession speaks with affection. Beyond the windows are gardens and trees and a street with lively traffic; all the buildings in sight are covered with ivy. This has the feel of both country cottage and Harvard dormitory. I sit at the window and write. Everywhere I look, my eyes rest on beauty.

Sometimes I feel that I am connected to nothing at all. This is when I am spelunking, so far inside my head I forget eyes and heart were made for looking outward.

Possessions embody all the small bits of our whole, lovely selves. What do I want with a microwave oven, bicycle, nightstand, welcome mat, bowls? These are not my accoutrement. The world of my connection is small and dense. I live in a hothouse, a jungle of flowers. I live in a riot of scent!

Sometimes I feel I am connected to nothing at all, and sometimes I feel I am a node on a great, cosmic ‘Net. Ephemera. Connection. This is my context. I like it. We are nothing so substantial as dust on the wind.

Words are scent. Memories are. Love is. We are.
.
.

A scent

But of course a scent does not exist in a vacuum.

(I meant that metaphorically, but it poses an interesting scientific question.)

You might think that because it floats freely, disembodied, scent is not connected to anything at all.

Imagine.

You are walking into the Sears store in Honolulu, the one in the big mall outside Waikiki. You take the escalator to the floor where they sell formal wear. If you’re going to hang out with Honolulu’s Sinatra, who enjoys buying you a tiny dish of ice cream after each night’s last show and gossiping about what’s going on in Chinatown, who learned 14 languages by approaching them as if they were songs, who after the ice cream insists that you kiss on both cheeks and actually takes your head in his hands when you try to get away with air-kisses before putting you into a cab, who really does, like so many discredited men, want nothing more (but what could be more?) than companionship, then you need to have the cool Mamo mu’u, not some hippie calico thing picked up in the Salvation Army in Hilo. You are riding the escalator. Imagine a scent.

Hold on! First it strikes you. Then it floods you. Before you can name the scent, you feel… you are gone.

Don’t take a tumble! Hold onto the handrail!

You are on an escalator, but it is not the one in Honolulu. It is in Detroit, and you are so little you don’t even know how old you are, and your dad has the warm bag in his hand.

It is roasted peanuts.

Scent connects.

An Interesting Scientific Question

If a flower bloomed in the forest with no one to smell it, would it have scent?

Even in a metaphorical vacuum, a flower would emit its perfume. But perfume is not scent; it is chemical compounds. It becomes scent when it connects with one who has a sense for translation.

And if the perfume found no receptor? Is the flower less alive? Would it, heartbroken, wither and die? No. A flower lives fully, perfuming the world.

Perfume may exist in a vacuum; scent only by virtue of connection.

Words are scent. Memories are. Love is. We are.

Sometimes I think I may be connected to nothing at all

Sometimes I think I may be connected to nothing at all. My inventory--short-term lease, blank walls, scant furniture, stacks of boxes packed and unpacked (at the ready)--presents mostly ephemera.

This is my context. I like it.

We are nothing so substantial as dust on the wind. We are scent.

I Have No

Bicycle
Roller blades ice skates
Skis
Satellite Tivo Cable HD
Land line
Internet
TM IM iPod iTunes
Stereo
Radio
Camcorder
TV

Curtains nor drapes
Art on the walls
Framed family photos
Fresh flowers vases
Coffee table knick-knacks souvenirs
Mirror

Refrigerator art
Recycling bin
Garbage bags garbage
Disposal
Dishwasher
Coffeemaker
Microwave
Juicer steamer toaster toaster-oven
George Foreman Grill
Liquor cabinet wine rack liquor
Condiments
Crackers
Hot pads
Pasta
Serving spoons
Cheese knives
Placemats napkins dining room chairs
nor table
Bowls

Air conditioning


Fine sheets soft light
Chest of drawers
Book stack
Bedside lamp
Clock radio
Nightstand
Bible condom-stash gun

Holiday apron
Spare set of keys
Ashtrays
Potted plants yard art
Subscriptions deliveries
Welcome mat

* * *

To the extent that one’s possessions indicate one’s attachments and preoccupations, what is to be made of this dis-inventory?

Clearly the poet has scant attachment to consumer goods or creature comforts or even a domicile.

Perhaps the poet lives in a situation that renders such things moot, for example, a commune, welfare hotel, prison, asylum, nursing home, rehab spa, or monastery.

Every possession is a talisman, every talisman a mirror. Without accoutrement, how do we remember all the small bits of our whole, lovely selves? How do we situate ourselves in the world, space and time?

Without situation, to what can we connect?

Let’s explicate:

The poem is steeped in feminine awareness. Surely the poet is a woman, else the poem would not have been written at all. Or, in the unlikely event, it would have given us a glimpse into other regions of the domicile: the garage or music collection. Would a man have made note of the absence of flour, or the holiday apron?

[Yes. Of course a male writer could mention the flour or apron. But the writer is not the poet who inhabits this piece. The poet of the piece—the character living within the lines—is clearly a feminine presence.]

The poet seems singularly cut off from the world. It is not only the lack of media; every line says it is so. She has no family; a family has bowls. She has no lover; the bedroom is barely utilitarian, a cell. She has no friends—no welcome mat. No media. Not even a magazine crosses her threshold.

Does she live in dead silence?

No art, nor photos nor flower arrangements nor knick-knacks nor potted plants, not even yard art. On what beauty do her eyes rest?

It is precious to point out the lack of a mirror.

Perhaps she has a pet? The poem doesn’t say.

The poem doesn’t say.

Here is an artist’s trick: Draw the white space around objects. You will be amazed by what new things you will see in the same old things: shapes and relationships, varying intensities of light.

White space reveals what is not. In drawing it, you reverse the polarities of real and naught. You make the naught real--and thus render the real, naught?

The imagination laps this stuff up. In the end it leaves you with mystery. This is the holy purpose of art.

But.

It doesn’t do you much good if you’d like to know whether the poet might enjoy a cheese sandwich.

First things first. By making the naught real, the artist does not render the real naught. Of course not. We live in an Einsteinian world: Artists create mystery, they do not destroy matter.

Still, if Einstein were pondering the cheese-sandwich problem, he would be stuck. He could explicate until he was blue in the face. For all its material detail, the white space of this poem gives no answer.

Might the poet enjoy a cheese sandwich? The poem does not say. If you want to know, you must speak first. You must ask, you must say…

Groovy Tango

Here's a little peace from the Woostock Tango website.

Imagine Janis and Jimi ...

Living the Life You Didn't Intend

Here was this guy with the big mustache, the big cigar and the silly hat," she recalled in 1982. "I thought, 'I don't know what this is, but it's for me.' "

Read more.

Bingo + Tango ...

In Chicago:

14 Tuesday2 BINGO/TANGO

The Museum of Contemporary Art adds an interesting twist to the classic game of bingo by integrating both quirky art and tango components.

Bingo games are based on the shapes of artworks in the museum's collection. Attendees learn to tango with professional Argentine tango dance instructors Somer Surgit and Agape Pappas between games.

The free event will take place at 6 p.m. in Puck's Café; cash bar and light fare available for purchase; mcachicago.org

La Milonga Brings Romance and Tango to LA Femme Film Festival

The film is set in 1920's Buenos Aires and was inspired by the era of Carlos Gardel and the rise of Tango. La Milonga tells the story of a young woman who wanders into a Milonga dance hall, and meets the number one Milonguero .... In this stylized and romantic tango film, the two dancers discover a part of themselves previously unknown.

LA Femme Film Festival is a premier festival that focuses on women filmmakers, showcasing their commercial films for the world wide audience.

Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance

In sad, grim World War I New Zealand, Schmidt, an English piano tuner, taught a local girl to dance:

"They danced around the room, and then when the song he hummed in her ear showed signs of petering out he would dash back to play a few more bars, rekindle his memory, then return to her with the retrieved melody. Back and forth he went between the piano and her. … They danced and danced until the late afternoon shadows spread over the lawn outside."

A tale about finding your place in the world through someone else's storytelling.... Seattle Times

Read reviews at amazon.com and LA Times

Take That, One Heart, You Bastard!

What would you like to work on today? Grisha asks.

I keep a list. It says things like sacadas and Gustavo turn.

Today I did not consult the list.

Today I hemmed and hawed. Looked out the window. There’s a nice bit of lawn. What I want is so off the wall I don’t really know how to ask. I know what I want, exactly, but I can’t form the words. Several disjointed sentences later, it boils down to this: Self-defense.

Why not?

I have faced what The Mathematician would describe as a philosophical dilemma with practical implications: What to do in the face of leads’ bad behavior?

If a woman joins tango she should expect… a favorite lead begins.

At my protest he backs off. A little.

…she should not be surprised … he concedes.

I think he really still means what he first said. Lots of men—and women--do.

Glenlivet is clear in his thinking: It’s a no-brainer. She shouldn’t expect it, she shouldn’t have to. Men should behave. End of story.

I love it when he talks like that. But I do not live in the world of should. As Keith used to say, with a little less class, you can spit in one hand and wish in the other… and what have you got?

I believe you have something that a guy making advances will probably not like to have wiped on his shirt.

* * *

I have asked Nina many times what to do about men who would rather cuddle than dance. She makes me be the lead. When I squeeze her, she gets big. I don’t know how. She just does.

Today, near the end of the lesson, after we have done sacadas and a clever little adornment that I have failed to practice, Grisha says, What did you want to work on?

First we do Holding Too Tight. I am the lead. He makes himself big. He shows me how. We dance with me big.
Wow! he says. That was the best boleo you’ve ever done! We try it again. Wow-wow! Self-defense and a boleo! Who knew? Things are looking up!

What else? he asks.

I try to explain, but I am nearly incoherent with embarrassment. OK, so what I’m going to do is, I’m going to be the lead and I’m going to give you a sign … earlier today, planning this, I thought I could just say the word “now,” and then he could show me what to do. But here in the moment as my explanation unravels, that seems unlikely to work, so I say I will give you a sign, I will poke you like this—I am holding him like I was the lead, and I jab him in the shoulder blade with my index finger—and then you… you know, you act like you’re me and show me what to do….

I pretend we’re dancing, even though I can’t lead one single step and we are only standing still. I poke him, kind of harder than I was expecting.

He rears back. The look on his face is … Hilarious. Awful. He could be an actor. It is shock and consternation and dislike, even disdain.

That’s great! I say. So I should just look at them like that? That’ll do it? Do I walk away too?

He doesn’t really answer. That look is still on his face. I think we are going to have to try this again.

I am the lead again. Tra-la-la-la-la….POKE!

Grisha pinches the back of my neck. Playfully.

That would never work! I say. They will think I am flirting!

Grisha looks confused.

Why are they poking you? he asks.

No! I say. They are not poking me. I am only poking you because … it’s supposed to be like a surrogate … a signal … You’re supposed to… Now I have worked my way into a corner and a frenzy. Ohmigod! I blurt it out as fast as I can: I am poking you because I am not about to grab your butt.

The look he gives me now is truly amazing.

I think we will dispense with the demo. I explain the problem. We talk it over. No need to repeat the painful details. Here is the upshot:

You walk off. You don’t have to say “Take that, you bastard!” You don’t have to speak at all. You can just go away.

I love that! in theory, but

When I am face-to-face with a fellow human being, I can’t be that way. I can’t think of a time I’ve walked away from someone. I don’t think this is a matter of being a woman. It’s just not in me. I can’t do it.

That’s that.

This is the way I was raised: If you don’t do something well the first time you try it, you never will. Move on. Try something else.

I do not wish to try something else. I wish to stick with tango.

Hmm…

Two years ago, I couldn’t stand up in my tango shoes.

I need practice.

I am going to call Kari.

MoveOn.ohd

He apologized. I accepted.

We move on.

* * *

Keith has taken flight off a few roofs. He used to install and repair solar systems; falling is a job hazard. The trick, he said, is to control the landing.

Long after he stopped doing solar, he had his worst fall. He broke his left side. Ribs, hip. His wrist was destroyed.

For an artist to lose a hand is

There are no words for that.

Keith was lucky; a renowned hand surgeon was in the emergency room that day. He (Lewis Oster, Superdoc!) saved Keith’s wrist. It took most of a day of surgery and many casts and visits to the doctor. After months the wrist would not heal; the bones and joint had been ground to sand and gravel, and the pieces would not grow back together. The surgeon was shaking his head. Sooner or later, the cast would have to come off and that would be that.

As a last-ditch effort, Keith let me try visualization. I had never really done it before. I pictured the bits and pieces as ice floes, drifting together, melding. It worked! It was lucky for Keith that it did. For me, it was holy.

Everyone celebrated. Whoo-hoo!

When Keith felt his solid in his bones again, we went to breakfast at a truck stop diner, our favorite treat.

Next to the cash register was a box of buttons, the kind you wear on your lapel. We laughed at one, but the laughter cut at my heart.

Not Keith. He liked it! I saw only the first words. Keith saw the whole, larger truth.

Keith carried the button around. He showed it to all of his buddies. One day he stuck it to the refrigerator door with a magnet. Finally, he affixed it to the top of his toolbox, the one that sits front and center on his workbench.

In plain black letters on a white background it said:

I FALL DOWN, I GET UP

* * *


In a lesson several weeks ago, Grisha stopped between dances. This is when he explains what part of me is out of whack.

Your embrace feels different, he said …

approvingly.

!!!

Finally, finally! After two years I have finally managed to line up wings and center and axis and balance and all the rest of it. Finally, I know I will make the dancer I know I can be. It has been a mystery to me why I could not catch on. All of my littermates progressed much faster than me.

I am a renowned klutz. No one who knows me can believe I would ever make a dancer. They think it’s adorable that I want to try, like a duck that wants to pull a wagon. But I have always known with certainty that it is in me … if I could only master the body mechanics, if I could stick with it until I get over that hump …

Now I am mystified. I know I am a much better dancer. It happened suddenly, without cause. What clicked? I don’t know.

It feels like you trust me, he added.

* * *

The night before the Harvest Moon milonga, Stan was happier with our dancing than he has ever been. He was beaming. I was mystified. What was different? He tried to explain. Writing this now, I think I know: It feels like you trust me.

Yes, well …

Nothing personal, GrishaGlenlivetStanTomAndreyMr.Mathematician, I’m just stepping it back a bit. I may have advanced prematurely. The landscape looks different from what I expected. I need to regroup.

* * *

I am not running for the exit. Kari would laugh if I said I were. I have said it too often already. I am not running. I am edging toward the back row.

At the Mercury Cafe, you must climb several steps to get to the back rows of tables and chairs. It is quiet and shadowy. You are practically invisible; no one comes looking for a partner up there. You can enjoy the music and let your mind wander or chat with someone who is taking a break from the dancing. It is almost like being in the time-out chair, which is a lovely place for a daydreamer.

Like so much of the Merc, it’s a metaphor. I have a place like that inside myself. I think I might hang there for a while. I don’t want to stop dancing. I am making progress and I don’t want to lose it. Still, I think I’ll let technique front for me for a while. I think I can get away with that for a while.

It is not forever. I have learned to trust the tango cycle: It knocks me down, in a little while I get up.

* * *

It takes a big person to apologize simply. Add that to the mix, to keep all this honest.

I make up the nicknames for people in this blog. I could call this guy something vulgar, but I won’t, not based on this one incident.

No person is all one thing or another. He had a moment. If he has another, I will hear about it and I will gather a posse and we will push him through the brick wall, and you can read all about it here, including his name. Meanwhile, I am turning my attention to fences.

Mending fences is hard. Someone has to be willing to hold the nail while the other wields the hammer. You have to trust and you have to be wary. You have to be present, like a Zen monk washing the dishes.

It takes two to mend a fence.

He and I? No.

The fence metaphor refers to a shared border. In geography you can’t choose who shares your border; in tango you can. The fence I am mending is the border I share with The Five and my teacher. It is trust. They are not responsible for damaging the fence, but they will help me repair it.

To be honest, I’m not all that enamored of trust. If I had known that’s what tango is all about, I would not have come near it. Too late now. I am enchanted.

There is a commercial for a phone service. A geek holds a cell phone. He walks two steps and says, “Can you hear me now?” Every two steps he asks, “Can you hear me now?"

I danced like that geek. Every two steps I was asking, Are you going to hurt me? Are you going to hurt me now?

By “hurt,” I don’t mean slap me. I mean "do me harm." I really was asking: Can I trust you? Can I trust you now?

I danced with a doomed man’s bravado. I never anticipated the answer would be yes, but over time I got used to it: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. With every step it is Yes.

Well … not every step. There are missteps, criticism, innuendoes, advances …

Oh!

As it turns out, there is a corollary to the question, Can I trust you?

The corollary is this: Are you going to throw something at me that I can’t handle?

And the corollary to that question is: Can I trust me to handle what comes my way?

Most of the time … in my own time … the answer is Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Now when I dance with someone I trust, I own my space. When I come into the embrace, I am there. I am grounded in a conditional faith in certainty—trust.

I am not stupid. I know this is, like, you know, all about life. But life is big. I like to take it in small doses. One tanda, one dance at a time.

And that’s how The Five and my teacher and I will mend the fence. They won’t have to do much; this is my work to do. I trust me to do it; I have done it before.

But this is not only about me, Glenlivet points out.

As a social dance, tango can only exist within the safe space created by shared assumptions about—and insistence upon--right behavior. A major role of Tango Colorado is to propagate the culture that preserves the safe space.

When someone violates behavioral norms, Glenlivet says, it damages the fabric of the community. Like it or not, One Heart owes it to the community to do something about it.

Eeek! Really?

He’s not going to give ground on this. I can tell.

Trust is not merely a one-on-one thing. It is, itself, the fabric of community. Thus, trust can’t trickle down; it can only ripple out. Private actions have public effects. I am extrapolating to the moon, and maybe I am getting it all wrong, but I am trusting you on this, Glenlivet.

So

I will turn my attention to the mending of fences until trust grows like wisteria, until you cannot tell where any fence is, exactly, and the twining vine cannot be contained but spills over, wending through the community, reweaving the fabric by its own verdant will.

Good people fall down. They get up.

We move on.

Cocooned

It’s Tuesday night, and what could be more appealing than to spend the night cocooned? No need to go back to the Turn so soon. It will be there next week.

My apartment is especially beautiful at night, the windows black mirrors, the wooden floor glowing in the lamp’s small light.

I have homework from Grisha to practice for Friday’s lesson. Last night, Joe ran me through his version of Eleven Perfect Steps, and there’s work to be done there as well.

I have my DiSarli CD. That is the music for a night like tonight. Everything is inviting.

But.

I am in the midst of a story that is unfolding simultaneously in the blog and in life. I didn’t choose the story, but I have chosen to tell it. To continue to tell it, I must continue to live it…

What the heck, I must continue to live it regardless. You can walk off the floor mid-tanda; you can’t walk away from your own true story.

So tonight I do not cocoon myself in a dancing meditation.

I go back to tango.

* * *

Costume can be disguise or armor.

When I started tango, I often wore long-sleeved, turtleneck tops. Armor.

Tonight I need something very covered up, but subtly so, in a way that will not betray that I am running scared. Disguise.

Costume is its own kind of cocoon.

* * *

I like the spare, severe lines of tight pants.

Pants make a woman look too powerful for tango. Some men interpret that costume to mean she wants to wear the pants in the dance. So I am told.

Pants do not make me look powerful, except in the way that the stem is stronger than the blossom of a flower. That is how tight pants make me be. When I am wearing tight pants, the whole length of me is one piece, flexible and strong and free. Resilient.

When I am wearing tight pants I feel my legs extend strong from my hip sockets down into the earth, eight inches or more below the surface. I am the stem, I terminate in roots. The earth feeds me power, my body gives it back. This is grounded.

The walking trees of Tolkein do not tear their roots free and replant them at every step; their roots remain buried even as they walk. This is grounded.

I love to follow.

I don’t want to own power, I want it to flow through me.

I want to be that strong.

* * *

Tonight I need a costume that makes me feel self
-contained. Covered up,
strong. Something that says I,
myself can hold my own.
Not because a lead is
taking care of me. Because
I am taking care of myself.

Covered up but not
timid. Tonight
I need a costume that holds everyone
yet at arm’s length, says,
My strength can match
any of you, bring it
on and on and-and …
on.

** *

The thick, winter-weight pants. The long-sleeved t-shirt over sturdy lingerie.

Covered up but not timid. The t-shirt is sheer black over a solid black camisole. The lingerie is hot pink, only the strap whispering Psst! from behind the cami and t-shirt, an accessory to match the Chinese character scrawled on the front of the shirt.

What does the character say?

Various leads have made guesses. It’s a game to play between dances. On any given night, any guess can be right. Tonight I choose Rick Moss’s best guess:

Biker Bitch.

Covered up but not timid. The whole thing fits like a stem's epidermis.

* * *

And the Comme il Faut’s with the spike heels.

And the earring, a three-inch saw blade resected from the eviscerated belly of a Swiss Army knife. It can draw blood.

Just in case.

* * *

To those who are not captivated by the surfaces of things, a costume can be quite revealing.

* * *

Each of us has to live our life story. It helps to take it in small doses.

I arrive midway through the evening. It has been my technique. I arrive in time to work the desk, and by the time my shift is up, I am acclimated to the scene and can dance.

Tonight I arrive earlier than usual, in time for the community dance. It is my new tango practice: Dance with strangers. Working with shyness is like taming a horse. Sometimes you have to back off, and sometimes you just have to make it do what you want it to do.

The community dance is set up to create a random mix of partners, each dance interval lasting as long as the lead likes it to last.

I am lucky! My first partner is Nick Jones, with whom I have just had my first private lesson. He whips us into an off-balance turn, the kind he is going to teach this weekend in a workshop titled “Turn ‘Til you Puke,” with Luiza Paes.

I am signing up for that workshop!

My next draw is lucky, too: The Mathematician! What are the odds? The Tragedy of Tuesdays is that he practices all night with a classmate; this brief community dance is the only chance I will have to dance with him. He makes the dance last a lovely long time. Lucky!

OK. That’s enough bravery. I do not trust my luck to hold.

I scurry to the lobby, work my shift at the welcome desk. For the rest of the night, despite the rules against dancing more than one tanda, I take shelter in my practice partner’s safe, familiar, safely familiar embrace.

Miss Tango Manners Is That a Hand on My ...?

Dear Miss Tango Manners:

I can't decide whether to cry or kick someone.

Last night at the Tango Colorado Harvest Moon milonga, I was dancing with a lead who made advances. [Material deleted. All letters are edited for space, tone, and decency.]

Eek!

I almost walked off the dance floor—but that would be bad manners, wouldn’t it?

What drove him to this? Was he carried away by the music? I was wearing a dress. The neckline is only a little immodest and I cannot imagine the sight of my bony chest where cleavage belongs incited such action. What am I doing wrong?

I made a beeline for the exit. I was nearly out the door when ... [Material deleted. All letters are edited, etc.] ... and I'll put him through a fucking brick wall," Glenlivet said. Something like that.

So I didn't run. For the leads who knowingly or not helped me settle down, I still have stars in my eyes. I danced all night, and my feet are feeling the happy effects.

Sincerely,

One Heart Dancing

* * *

Dear One Heart Dancing:

My dear, your letter disturbs me.

When a lead takes liberties reserved for a lover, assuming of course, that he is not your lover, he is mostly likely not carried away. He is most likely suffering a willful lack of self-control.

You must think of him as the freckle-faced boy in third grade who was caught looking up the teacher’s skirt. Did she make allowances, knowing as she must, false modesty aside, that her mellifluous voice surely drives young boys to distraction--even as it does the endless string of men whom she has wrapped around her little finger until it aches from their combined weight--as she read the answers to the spelling test? Did she draw on the wisdom of Freud, Jung, Wittgenstein to weigh the influence of his idcollectiveunconsciouszeitgeist? Did she spare his feelings?

No! She smacked him with a ruler and sent a note home to his mother.

You must be that lead’s teacher.

Miss Tango Manners concedes that it is unlikely you will have a ruler ready to hand as you are on the dance floor. This does not preclude hiding, in the belt of your dress, a flexible willow switch or perhaps a slim leather whip tastefully dyed to match your shoes with a fair-sized stone tied at the end of the lash, something sparkly with facets.

Similarly, it is unlikely you will succeed in contacting this lead’s mother. This does not preclude you from alerting every follower in Tango Colorado to his behavior. Forewarned is forearmed. (Bulk orders 15% off. Discreet shipping $10 per address. Order from iTangoWhip.com.*)

One Heart, you beseech me to tell you in what ways your dress or your you-ness are to blame for this debacle. I believe that you know. You are a wimp. When you adopt that stance with a bad-mannered lead, you are playing into his hand. So to speak, crudely.

You must stop this Eek!ing business. It is time to grow up.

When a lead makes advances upon your body, you must reveal to him a part of your anatomy he may never have seen before: your backbone.

You must resist the urge to think. You’ll only flummox yourself as you second-guess or make excuses for bad behavior. Actions speak loudly. Listen.

Similarly, with your actions enunciate. There is no need to make excuses for dancing in the embrace that is most comfortable for you. Soft-pedaling opens the door to the Wiggle Room. Though Miss Tango Manners generally decries the slamming of doors, in this case she grants an exemption.

Practice saying No. A worldly woman requires a wardrobe of No’s as large as her collection of tango costumes. (As in: I don’t like it when you… or Please stop … or It is hard on my back when you… or That’s uncomfortable for me.) It would behoove you, One Heart, to turn your attention from your manner of dress to your form of address. Your time and talent are best spent fashioning for yourself a veritable wardrobe of ways to say No.

Include in your wardrobe nonverbal refusals, for example, the adornment Graciela Gonzalez demonstrated in Las Vegas. It’s a simple matter of timing and the correct height of the knee.

Work on your technique for walking off the floor. It is part of the wardrobe of No, as fully justified as the hot-pink, fits-like-paint, fringed minidress in your tango closet. Such options are not suitable for everyday use, but one must admit they serve their respective purposes.

Allow me to remind you, One Heart, as you have a tendency to blame yourself for the vagaries of others (which is, let us admit, a pathetic yet amusing attempt to usurp responsibility for their actions and hence claim for yourself the power to control every situation):

The failure here is not of control but of self-control. The failure is not yours.
To put it simply: Your dress is not the culprit.
To put it crudely: It is not the dress that grabbed your ass.

And now, pursuant to the comments deleted from your note (all letters are edited for space, etc.):

Bestow a chaste kiss on the cheek of the jaguar. A beast who frees the mermaid from her earthly prison has earned a boon. Take care to avoid bestowing upon him the fabled kiss that drives men to dash into the sea. It would be quite a long dash from Denver. The other followers will not appreciate the loss of this charming lead.

As your knight in shining armor, Glenlivet would undoubtedly appreciate some token of the lady’s appreciation. In the days of jousts and quests, ladies would gift their champion with a scrap of fabric. That seems a paltry gift. Miss Tango Manners suggests an invitation to coffee.

Now we come to the difficult case. Apparently, Stan has miraculous healing powers. Did not another follower marvel to you on Friday night that the pain in her foot, which had been plaguing her for some time, vanished as she danced with Stan? And did she not confide that the effect was long-lasting … though perhaps beginning to wear off … and perhaps she would need dances periodically throughout the evening to keep the pain at bay?

When one’s contribution is made by nature rather than effort, no thank-you gift is required. The idea of leaving gifts to nature is out of vogue, notwithstanding the cigarettes and gin that, to this day, some tourists leave(and others shamefully scavenge) at the rim of Halemaumau in place of the virgins that were never really sacrificed there.

No. For Stan, Miss Tango Manners must insist that gin and cigarettes and dead virgins are out of the question. Better to offer a gift he can use: 4 hours of practice on Monday. Perhaps you could use this time to perfect Graciela’s adornment.

Best regards,

Miss Tango Manners


*Gotcha!

Teaching Assistants

Tango taxis.

It's prostitution! Nina yells.
Is not!
Is too!
Is not!
Who cares?
Is not!
Is too!
Obvious jokes.
Is not!
Is too!

That's pretty much the gist of the TC listserv for the week following a new board member's brainstorm to provide experienced dancers (mostly male) with free admission to a practica if they would agree to dance with the (mostly female) wallflowers so they won't get discouraged and quit.

In the end, the taxis won out. Now every Tuesday at the Turn, you will find several women and a few men adorned with ENORMOUS fake flower corsages, a little smashed. (The flowers, that is. From the close embrace.) Originally, the board member proposed that the taxis wear armbands, so people know who they are. This was deemed too embarrassing for the wallflowers. Hence the Rocky Horror Picture Show corsages.

This is how we do things in Tango Colorado; kind of goofy, but it mostly works out well in the end.

Deb and Brian Sclar, Dance of the Heart, take a different tack. Their taxis are intermediate dancers who are teaching assistants. At the two classes and milonga I visited, assistants offered little instruction or coaching, rather danced with the glut of women. It was nice to have them: It was nice to see no one stuck on the sidelines during class, and during the milonga was nice to have the competition siphoned off to the assistants--leaving the leads I like free to dance with me!

All of this to say, Tango Cherie has an article on this topic at her blog.

Chacarera, part 2

This is how it starts:

Incense. Prayer. On the table beside the stereo is the Spanish language version of a moving book, The Mastery of Love. With a brief prayer and meditation, Daniel invites us into a space that is not about dancing so much as the movement of our hearts.

The clapping is not so difficult. It is ma-Ma, pa-PA, Daniel says.

The choreography is easy. If you can count to three and cross one leg in front of the other without falling down, you can do it.

Thanks to twelve years of music study I can count to three if someone helps me get started. Thanks to two years of tango study I can cross one leg in front of the other without falling down.

There is some difficulty about the arms. Most people at first, they look like they are robots made of Legos. But if you have always harbored a secret dream to be a chorus girl in 1940 B-grade musicals, you can lift your arms just right.

The steps are easy and repetitious. It's fun to have someone opposite you, not in an embrace but connected just the same.

It's so easy that you can soon forget about the steps and lead wtith your heart.

We end in a circle, praying for peace.

I am cut out for chacarera!

Chacarera

Here’s how it starts:

Fast, tricky music. Then clapping. Then Daniel and his partner. She sways and skips. His feet fly. He follows the geometry of the rhythm. Who knew? I never imagined rhythm had geometry until I saw it in Daniel’s feet.

Chacarera is a flirtatious dance. The man shows off his fancy footwork to impress the girl, his partner.

The girl has it easy. She just has to raise her arms in a bowed way, as if she were carrying a huge basket filled with flowers, and skip around like a chorus girl in a B-grade American movie about Greece. If she is wearing a very full skirt she gets to play around with it--lift the edges and swish!, showing her knees.

How much fun is that?!

In two hours I am going to find out.

Since the announcement of the classes a month ago, I have been deciding not to go. I have to keep deciding not to go because I keep being tempted to try it.

I am not cut out for Chacarera. It is fast and vigorous, and fast and vigorous scares me. For no apparent reason, but still, one does not have to have reasons to feel fear.

Also, there’s the matter of rhythm. I have none. Whatsoever.

Hmm…

Tuesday night at the Turn Daniel and his partner performed. Last night at the Merc they invited dancers who know Chacarera to join them. Carla and Brian got out there. They had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t look foolish; they looked like they were trying something new.

Hmm…

Later, chatting with a lead, he said he wanted to take the class but had no partner.

Hmmm…?

I am going to stink at this. Really stink. My partner expects he will, too. That will make it easy for both of us.

Even better, we will be in a room full of people who get it … that you have to start somewhere, and some of us start pretty far back in the pack.

They deal with it in the same way that golfers do: give one another allowances, so everyone can play. In golf they call it a handicap; in Tango Colorado they don’t call it anything, it just goes with the territory.

It’s the blessing of Tango Colorado. Sometimes the community is described as a dysfunctional family, but that is not the whole truth. We are a family in this good way too: Even when we are yelling at one another, we preserve a sense that we are all in this together. We stink and then we get better in ways that encompass much more than dancing.

But for today, I only need the space and grace to really stink at this new kind of dancing. I will get both. Not only from the tango community, but from me, too. In the past year I’ve learned that, for all the slings and arrows, my harshest critic is me. But I can also be my biggest fan. When I started this essay I wasn't sure I could go through with the class after all. I’ve just spent the last hour writing myself a pep talk. Here’s the finale:

I am going to really stink at this today … and then I am going to get better. The dance of a thousand intricate steps begins with a single one, etc., etc.

I am enamored of freedom, and there is nothing more freeing than agreeing to let yourself be, really be, a beginner.

I am an Adventurer of the Moment!

The Adventurer must go get dressed. I’m wearing my blue dress. It’s casual and pretty, and the skirt goes Swish!

Magic Lucky Tango Nights

Magic Lucky Tango Nights. A small festival built around live music.

What does it mean to build a festival around music?

Lively--gleeful, even--give-and-take among musicians and dancers in classes, lecture and concert, milongas.

It was magic.

At first we didn't know what to make of the musicians, then we adored them; they were proud of our progress and told us so. The air glowed. At times, you could see the orchestra and dancers reaching out to one another. Taking to the floor was like entering light. Saying goodbye, one of the organizers said with feeling, "This isn't a festival. It's a family."

We were all lucky to be there.

Magic Lucky Tango Festival

Today I go to Las Vegas for the Magic Lucky Tango Festival.

My stomach is going with me, but under protest. It has been protesting for the past week.

I could enumerate the reasons but if you have read this blog for more than a week, you can guess all the usual suspects. Here's the short version: Las Vegas is very busy and high-energy, a kind of atmosphere that puts me in cornered-cat mode. It occurs to me there will be strangers there. Walking into a room full of strangers--cornered cat mode. I might be expected to actually dance with these strangers. Cat-under-the-sofa-for-a-week mode.

I am going because Los Hermanos Macana are teaching and performing. There are other very famous people as well. But they are the only reason I am going. If you haven't seen them dance, look for them on YouTube.

When deciding to go o I had half-decided to go, debating the pros (Los Hermanos Macana) and cons (strangers! eek!) when one of my practice partners offered to take the classes with me. This is also not good. I do not want to coddle myself in the face of this phobia of strangers. But I will put that bit on hold for now, because Los Hermanos Macana are teaching!

Still, you don't spend all of your time in classes. There milongas as well. At the Turn, you can always escape to the purple fainting couch in the enormous and beautifully decorated ladies lounge. At the Merc you can calm yourself by popping into the special room set aside for Bad Poets and Leftover Hippe Musicians.

What can you do in Vegas?

Count on magic and luck!

* * *

Warning: Contains Provocative Content

Oh for crying out loud. Am I about to Eeek! yet again?

[Impatient sigh.

Oh. That feels good.

Breathe.]

OK. Better now. Let’s move on.

I am in Las Vegas.

This is Magic Lucky Tango weekend. Graciela Gonzalez. Los Hermanos Macana. Fernanda and Guillermo. Pepe and Pablo Motta.

Whoo-hoo!

But before the fun can begin, I must get from the airport to the hotel. An elderly man sits next to me on the shuttle. He’d like to be friends. I’d like to look out the window.

Oh, my.

I am not prepared for Las Vegas.

I knew to expect the garish, over-the-top, conspicuous consumption Disney-for-grownups outlandishness of it all. I knew there were joints where the dancers are topless and that the window dressing can be quite lovely and even formal, so that the show serves as a palimpsest on which dancers and audience coauthor, over and over, new versions of old tales: holes drilled in the walls of girls’ locker rooms, glimpses through gaps in doors or curtains, Adam after the apple ogling Eve.

I am not prepared for the ubiquity of nudity.

I come from modest people. I don’t believe I have ever seen my father in shorts or a shirt without sleeves. Nor his father. I saw Keith without his shirt quite often, of course, but in general, a conventional marriage narrows a woman’s nudity-viewing options. I have no TV and I do not watch commercial movies. I do not read consumer magazines or women’s fiction. Denver’s billboards sell sports and IT. So perhaps I am a little less prepared for Las Vegas than another person might be.

I am not prepared, for example, for the bus-sized photo of the Chippendale crew. Or the billboard of three gorgeous women, topless but for the black bars photographers use to preserve their subjects’ identities. It seems that every flat surface in sight is covered in body parts, all tanned, some with faces attached.

I am not prepared for the billboard showing a photo of the back of a woman, shoulders almost to thighs—indirect lighting, very artsy--with the tagline “Always a happy ending” and, in huge letters, the word Tao.

This was not covered in The Tao of Pooh.

Nor am I prepared--not in the least, never could be, could not have imagined—that, when the shuttle dropped me on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, I would be greeted by a life-size, bronze relief sculpture of a line of chorus girls, bare backsides to the breeze, glinting in the fading sun … with an aging frat-boy-type tourist crouching near the girl in the center, polishing her curves, huge wolfish smile, mugging for his friend’s camera.

Do I let out an eek? Certainly not! I put on my Hell’s Kitchen face (jaded annoyance), wait until the boys finish, and breeze into the lobby with my “I do not have time for you or anyone else on this planet” walk.

Actually, I do not have much time. In two hours I going to see The Reve, a Cirque d’ Soleil type show with lots of water effects. Synchronized swimming, even!

I did not plan to see a show in Vegas; I do not enjoy pop music or magic or female impersonators and would die of embarrassment if I ended up looking at strangers with an absence of clothes. But a colleague told me about The Reve, and I made the mistake of telling my festival partner about it, and now we are going together, even though I don’t know him except to dance with and the idea of watching a show with a virtual stranger is not only unappealing (I like to be alone!) but has prompted the shyness butterflies to launch their own Circ-style show in my stomach.

It’s business as usual there in the stomach. It does not prevent me from looking forward to the show. I was born to water! I am Aquarius, and though my starstruck friends inform me that’s an air sign, I note that the symbol and the name of the sign is Water Bearer and I was born in Michigan, which is three-quarters island amid inland seas. Also, I once saw an excerpt of a Cirque show, and the inventiveness took my breath away.

Thus I am humming distractedly as I unlock the room, open the drapes to check the view through what turns out to be a tiny window (rooftop courtyard packed with air conditioning machinery), redraw the drapes, unpack, freshen up, scour the attic of my brain for topics of small talk.

This will be fine. There is only one hour before the show to fill with chat. After the show, there will be plenty to talk about—the acrobatics and staging and costumes. During the show, of course, there is no need to chat so, as long as the ladies keep all of their clothes on, everything will be fine.

Yes, this will be great!, I think, right up to the moment I walk out the door, scanning the confirmation paperwork we need to pick up the tickets, and my eye falls on the fine print:

“Contains provocative content not suitable for …”

!!!

.
.
.

Oh, what the heck:

Eeek!

One Heart Responds to Her Critic(s)

Let's back up a moment, to September 4, In Which One Heart Cooks Dinner.

Two-of-Six writes to say "that's disgusting!"

A writer never responds to the critics. Of course not. Cast not your pearls before swine and all that. No. You think kind thoughts about them, hoping this will create a harmonic convergence in their brain that will either cause them to love you or give them tinnitus.

Nevertheless. Sometimes a critic voices an opinion with such tone and wit that, despite its vacuity and wrongheadedness may become generally accepted.

So. I would like to disclose to you the sordid truth of this person whose opinon with which you may be agreeing. I know this sort of mudslinging is mostly ineffective. Look at Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton: Despite their fallabilities, people still hang on their words.

Nevertheless, a writer's gotta do what a writer's gotta do and at this moment I gotta set you straight on who is the Real Cook here.

Four-of-Six (that would be me) is the author of a cookbook. Not one of those community/church compilations with the weird plastic binding. A beautiful, full-color, illustrated children's gardening cookbook. It earned high reviews in national newspapers and more awards than I ever kept track of, from writers groups and booksellers and parenting groups.

In contrast...

Two-of-Six dusts her kitchen. Yep. Sweeps the cobwebs and dust bunnies off the stove top, out of the oven.

Years ago, she hosted Thanksgiving. She got stuck making the turkey. She tried to fish out the gizzard and neck with a spoon so she wouldn't have to touch anything. She gagged the whole time.

My mother can't laugh. A favorite childhood story involves my mother and her mother in the kitchen one night before Thanksgiving, wrestling the damn turkey, swearing like sailors.

But back to my critic. How much does she not cook? When her children were in day care, they came home one day to share amazing news:

Mom! they said. We had meat on a stick! And a drink on our potatoes!

(Chicken leg and potatoes with gravy.)

Of course, there is a difference between refusing to cook and lacking ability. Two-of-Six can cook. One of the favorites she made for her children has become a family staple. She has to make it for every single family function, and she is darn sick of it. Still, it's better than cooking the turkey.

It is Fluff. It is mostly synthetic. You can make it without actually touching any real food. Jello and frozen strawberries and maybe marshmallow creme or Cool Whip or something.

Disgusting, Two-of-Six. Disgusting!

And yummy.