Eeeek!

I’m standing in front of the mirror, aiming a lipstick at my mouth, when I spot something on my arm.

Eeeek!

My fingers go numb and the lipstick nearly takes a tumble.

Is that my bone? This can’t be! Where did all of my fat go? I’ve lost lots of weight, but not lately. Surely I haven’t. I don’t own a scale, but I’m pretty sure.

I have been eating and eating. I have gained weight. Surely I have. You can’t believe how much I eat.

If I go to my parents’ house with this bone sticking out, they will take it as proof of their suspicions that I am anorexic and pack me off to one of those places in the Utah desert where they will force feed me like a goose.

Eeek!

Take a moment, One Heart. Conduct a reality check.

My right arm is frozen in the position of lifting the lipstick. With my left finger, I reach across my body. Tentatively. Medical things gross me out. Bones and muscles are medical. So is fat. So is skin when stretched taut over a mysterious shape.

I brush the thing with the tip of a finger.

It doesn’t hurt. Doesn't bite. No Alien monster bursts out of it, roaring and spewing foul saliva.

I touch it lightly. Hello?

Inside, something resists. It is neither hard nor squishy. Not bone or fat. Not a Lump.

It is long and narrow but plump, like a fish swimming upstream to my shoulder.

I give it a poke. The thing goes flat and, when I remove my finger, it pops right back up.

Oh!

It’s a bicep!

* * *

Excuse me, but I need to get personal for a second.

My lingerie is too tight.

It is important to the story to tell you this; a good writer is always in service to the story. This does not prevent mortification, or a hot blush.

Let’s move on. Quickly.

* * *

These are your wings, Nina says. She is standing close, her arms reaching round. Her fingers meet at the spine and trace out to the shoulder blades.

Spread your wings, she says.

I hunch my shoulders, round them, pull them way down. Over months, I try dozens of contortions. One day I get it right. Who can say how? I surely can’t. I can’t repeat it, can’t hold it. And then I can, occasionally. And then every day. And then I can make it happen at will. I never know how. I don’t actually do it. I only imagine a word—strong—and there it is.

Presumably, there are muscles involved.

* * *

A few weeks after I started tango, Judith hosted a ladies’ party at Mercer’s, a consignment store on South Broadway far enough from central Denver to be severely un-tres-chic and therefore quite cool.

I arrived late. There was no one in the front room of the shop. It was quiet. Crossing to the back room, the sound grew loud.

More than a dozen women roamed the racks, piling up armfuls of things to try on. They had made a dent in the mimosas.

Look what I found! they called out. This is sooo right for you! They shared dressing rooms. There were squeals and giggles and groans and plaintive appeals: “Let me have that if you’re not going to buy it. … You don’t want it, do you?”

There were dares: I dare you to come out here in that! And bargains: I will if you will.

I found a few things and a storeroom to change in.

Some things that you like are not what you would wear. I found a kind of tank top, bronze silk, with flowers and leafy vines embroidered in bright reds and greens. It had stays, and it hooked up the front.

It’s called a bustier, Andrea said.

It doesn’t fit. I showed her. The hooks down the front didn’t quite meet; you could see a little line of skin there.

That’s how it’s made, Andrea said with a good deal of patience. Let me try it on if you’re not going to buy it.

Too tight, she said, seconds after she disappeared behind the curtain. My muscles are too big.

That’s a novel expression, I thought.

She pointed to her ribs, circling her side and around to her back. These are the muscles you use when you hold the frame, she said.

Sure thing, I thought. Women will make any excuse for a little fat in the corners.

The bustier fit me perfectly, Andrea pronounced. She decreed I should buy it. I didn’t really need her decree; it is the most beautiful piece of clothing I have ever had on.

Not that I have had it on often. I did not buy it to wear but to look at. With winter coming, I put the bustier in my best-sweater drawer. Every few days I got a glimpse of beauty as I dressed for work.

Occasionally I would put it on. The last time I tried, it didn’t fit. I could still get the hooks done, but the little stripe of skin was a wee bit wider, and I couldn’t breathe.

Wow!

Yikes!

Is it true, as my father believes, that creative, smart people go looking for trouble to spice up lives that are just too easy?

He says this about Five-of-Six, who has put herself in more dire straits more often than you can imagine. He says it about her, but he says it to me. A word to the wise.

I do go looking for trouble.

Trouble—complexities, obstacles, impossible challenges, the alien, surprises, threats--spices up a life I could otherwise live, have done, with one hand tied behind my back.

Living without using all of your faculties is subsisting; routine is a sensory-deprivation tank. Trouble calls on all of your faculties, all at once, urgently.

Looking for trouble is not chasing cheap thrills. Not at all.

Challenges and sensation-seeking: These are nothing. The Adventurer of the Moment bats them away as a superhero does henchmen, and for the same reason: to get at the Main Man, the Joker. To see in the mirror.

Trouble is not trouble if it doesn’t rattle your edifice and the ground it stands on.

Trouble is not trouble if it doesn’t rattle your soul.

Tango is a world of trouble.

Heh, heh.

* * *

Some people don’t go looking for trouble. They are like my father. They do not need to be shaken in order to use all of their faculties. Their territory is the intensity of the particular rather than the vast deeps.

When he was in high school, my father read a novel. Two sisters live in rural England, in the merchant class. One goes to London, pursues a glamorous career on the stage; the other stays home and takes over the family business.

I wanted to be the one who stayed home, my father says.

I am the luckiest daughter in the world.

* * *

Lately I have become better at tango, more accomplished at the gross motor movements, more relaxed about all that shivers me timbers.

I can keep my balance. I can follow most moves. I can set myself and my shivers aside. This spring something clicked, and since then I have been quite sure of my edifice, façade and foundation.

I have not mastered all of the vagaries of tango, and the edifice can go wobbly without notice. Still, for the most part, I stand on solid ground. If I can’t exactly dance with one hand tied behind my back, if I still run too often to the ladies’ with attacks of the vapors, there is a certain routine quality developing.

It no longer takes all of my faculties to dance tango.

This is the only explanation I have for my behavior last Friday night at the Merc.

(No, wait! Here’s another: Dan Diaz was playing.)

I would like to blame it on Grisha, but the poor guy has enough on his hands in trying to teach me this dance. And, I am not such a wimp as to hind behind the skirts of my teacher.

So. This is on me. I took his advice, and a little too far.

Infuse the dance with character, he said. A color, a childhood story.

I take this to mean, Dance what the music evokes.

I can never do this in a lesson. When I am in a lesson the only thing I feel is conscientious.

Friday night, I danced what the music evoked. And then took it further, and danced what I felt. Me.

Yikes!

* * *

I never flirted until I joined tango. Who knew? This is fun! I like to flirt with my speech and my eyes and my dance.

Flirting works because of parameters. Here are mine: I did not come to tango to make friends. I do not hug. I do not take phone numbers, nor give mine out. I do not date. My tango friendships do not extend beyond the milonga. Everyone knows this. I make sure they do, quite early on. The ones who don’t get it, I tell them.

This is a philosophical stance ... with practical implications.

Yes. Here’s one implication: I can flirt as much I please. Where there is no intent, there is no complication.

* * *

Friday night I was not flirting. Friday night I danced with intent.

Yikes!

Sunday night

Thinking outside the box is a good thing. Acting out, outside the box is something else entirely.

Tango Countdown ... Two Hours

Friday night at the Merc I behaved ... well, not badly. Let's not put a judgment on it. Let's just say out of character, out of my league.

In two hours I must be in in Boulder, at the Avalon, delivering dinner. I promised I would bring dinner in the weekly host's absence.

I am pretty sure to run into someone from Friday night.

Yikes.

I NEVER forward things like this but...

Why is it that everyone starts their junk mail forward that way? I am forwarding this to every powerful woman I know, starting with my mom.

Powerful Women

Live your life in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan shudders and says... 'Oh shit ...she's awake!!!'

Tango's Other Capital

Montevideo Doesn't Defer to Buenos Aires
From the Washington Post, July 11

"Buenos Aires is smart. They've marketed their tango to the world," says José Solari, a 49-year-old teacher of tango at Montevideo's Joventango Institute, a downtown studio housed in an aging art deco market. "But it's become so commercialized there that the only thing they see is pesos. . . . What we do, we do for love."

Elvis Costello, Zitarrosa, Lágrima Ríos Do Tango

sort of ...

Here's a review of the CD Mar Dulce, from the NYT:

BAJOFONDO
There’s a quandary right at the core of Bajofondo, the group led by the Oscar-winning Argentine composer, producer and guitarist Gustavo Santaolalla and the Uruguayan programmer and producer Juan Campodónico. Bajofondo’s beloved tango depends on impulsive shifts of tempo and dynamics: hesitations and rushes, passionate crescendos. Yet Bajofondo’s equally beloved electronica defies tango’s spontaneity, flattening dynamics with programmed repetition.

The instrumentals can be stalemates between the programmed beat and the hand-played sounds of tango’s bandoneon (accordion), piano or violin. So Bajofondo brings in guest vocalists as wild cards: singers including Nelly Furtado, Elvis Costello, the Argentine rockers Gustavo Cerati and Juan Subirá, the Mexican rocker Julieta Venegas and the octogenarian Uruguayan tango singer Lágrima Ríos, in her last recording, as well as rapping by Mala Rodriguez (from Spain) and Santullo (from Uruguay). They tip the balance toward imperfect, immediate humanity, and their drama rubs off on the instrumentals too.

* * *
and from Newsday:

Bajofondo dips into tango...

On "Zitarrosa," a track from the new Bajofondo album, "Mar Dulce" (Decca/Surco), the voice of the late Uruguayan singer and poet Alfredo Zitarrosa can be heard over a dub-electronica backing track. "The milonga is the child of candombe just as the tango is the child of the milonga," he intones. In that one sentence, he sums up the historical evolution of a regional Latin American music just as the electronica-based arrangements take it into the future.

Formerly known as Bajofondo Tango Club, this eight-member Argentine-Uruguayan collective is led by producer-composer Gustavo Santaolalla and DJ Juan Campodónico. Their new project is not so much a fusion version of tango than a collection of contemporary music from the Rio de La Plata area (which includes both Argentina and Uruguay) grounded in the musical language of tango.

As Zitarrosa - whose work was once banned by Argentina's dictatorial rulers - implied, the tango had its roots in African (candombe) and Spanish (milonga) genres. Bajofondo mixes in elements of hip-hop, dub, techno, house and rock, finding a frontier that Carlos Gardel never dreamed of. "Mar Dulce" accomplishes this in part by employing an attractive roster of guest collaborators, such as La Mala Rodríguez, Nelly Furtado, Gustavo Cerati, vocalists from rock bands Peyote Asesino and Bersuit, and even Elvis Costello.

Dance, and the Whole World Dances With You

Even if you don't think you dance well, you do...

French Tango

A classic writing assignment: Choose a picture and write a story about it. What is this lovely story? From ParisTango.

The Milonga Is Not the Place to Teach

A charming lead sent this excerpt last week to apologize for being a "DFT," dance floor teacher. Needless to say, when someone you have known for a year and have danced with a few times gives you a few pointers mid-milonga, that is a different thing than what is described here.

Click the link to read the full essay.

The Milonga Is Not the Place to Teach
http://tangothoughts.blogspot.com/

Tango possesses so many positive qualities, yet sometimes wrong conduct sabotages the possibility of these positive qualities coming together. "

. . .

"One reprehensible behavior is teaching anyone to dance after the start of or during the time of the milonga."

. . .

"The usual victim is the novice or inexperienced dancer at the milongas, eager to learn and enter into our marvelous world or, better yet, the occasional dancer, most likely a beginner, who has spent little time on the dance floor, who will acquiesce silently in order to avoid facing major troubles."

. . .

"At first the intention [of someone teaching during a milonga] would appear noble and generous, but this hides the true and unpleasant expression manifested by this behavior which is to assert oneself or make oneself appear to be an expert within the dance. "

. . .

"A second intention of he who attempts to teach or make corrections during the dance is to imprint an indelible message upon his partner that she lacks skill, is clumsy or is not capable."

Raul Cabral (translated by Dianne Castro)

My Body, My Self: One Story

There is a screen as big as a skyscraper. There are three blocks of color. The top half of the screen is blue and white, the bottom half is tan. The right third is filled with a big white curve—the left hip of a bikini-clad woman, swinging as she walks. With every swing, the size and shape and relation of every color block changes.

Thus another woman’s lifelong relationship with her body begins.

* * *

There is a beach-bunny movie. It is on at the drive-in theater.

Mom and Dad fold down the back seat of the station wagon, make up a bed big enough for three or four little girls, depending on how well they are getting along. Early on, when the novelty—the skyscraper screen and the metal speaker that hangs on Dad’s window (he drives from parking spot to parking spot to find one that works) and the girl whose orange-trimmed-in-white uniform gives her an air of supreme competence such that I would trust her with my life and sometimes do when I get lost trying to find my way back from the kiddie playground brings a Coke for everyone to share (because Dad feels he owes a little extra to the drive-in’s owner in return for packing seven people into one car on flat-rate night) along with the fruity drinks and snacks we have brought in a cooler--when everyone is too excited and hyped up to sleep, then four little girls pack into the middle seat and one gets the prize seat up front between Mom and Dad.

The best seat in the house is the least comfortable one. It’s the bed in the back. If you kneel up straight like a good girl in church, you can see right past all the obstacles—heads and dash and rearview mirror. Your legs get tired, and you had better have a pillow for your knees, and you can’t quite shake the saintly feel of it all, but there you are.

The cartoons are bright but pointless. This is the time to eat snacks, or wander among the cars pretending they are a maze, or say you are going to the bathroom but really hitch a last ride on the fire engine that circles the lot like a good-natured racehorse that in retirement has found its vocation.

And then it is dark and the uniformed girl has returned you safe and sound to your mothership and you take the scolding because it’s a fair trade for a ride on a fire engine.

Now the grown-up movies begin. The sound from the window-speaker does not carry to the back of the car, but it doesn’t matter because adult conversation is unintelligible anyway.

To a four-year-old who has never met a teenager or a beach, this movie is a National Geographic special. There are the exotic setting, tan sand and blue skies, the teenagers who look just like grown-ups but don’t behave like any people you have ever seen. They smile and laugh all the time, but they don’t really play. They don’t have chores. The boys don’t wear shirts, and the girls wear bikinis.

There is one girl in particular. Her name is Ann-Margaret. She wears a white bikini, a big, old-fashioned one. There is a scene, an expanse of beach with teens lounging in the distance. Ann-Margaret walks into the scene from the right with her back to the camera, and she must be very close to the camera, because on that part of the screen all you can see are her hips in that big white bikini, and they are going la jumba, la jumba.

Soon I am fast asleep. I’ve had my snacks, my ride on the fire engine. Who cares about teenagers?

Who knows of what the little girl dreamed? Felix the Cat with his magic bag of tricks? Playing cops and robbers in the sand, a much better movie for the four-year-old mind? I was a chubby kid, maybe I dreamed of the snacks.

I suspect that I dreamed of Ann-Margaret. How else did this image so clearly endure? The shot lasted only a few passing seconds; I have not seen the movie again, I do not even know what movie it was. I do not know if the memory-image is accurate. It is what I remember. But we do not remember what we see; we remember what comes of it after we make it our own.

What does the four-year-old make of those hips? It is not the sexuality that adults are bound to see, but its precursor: the affinity for pure physicality that young children have.

When you’re a little kid, you enjoy your body in motion, the vigor, your little muscles and bones working away. The physical sensation is a wonder, you cannot get enough!

At four years old you have been an embodied being for only four years—and you have been self-propelled only part of that time. With every move you make, your muscles and bones create a miracle. You did that! You did that!

What did you do? You created relations.

What is motion but a relation? A relation of self to body and body to space. With every move, you stake a claim. You toss a line from self to body, from intent to effect. You create a new spatial relationship between your body and the space around it and the objects in the space.

When you are a baby you are not the boss of anything. People can pick you up and put you down where they please. But now … look at you go! You invade this space, you occupy it, and by occupation rearrange the relative positions of all it contains. You are the boss!

When you have been at this for a long time, you become blind to the wonder. But when you are a kid, you still notice. When you take up a new body language, like tango, you notice again.

What did little One Heart make of Ann-Margaret’s hips? Three blocks of color, blue and tan and white, two stationary and one flowing. Every swing of her hips was a kaleidoscope’s twist, shifting the shapes and sizes of each block, their relations. All the colors and shapes loose in their sockets, all dancing to La Jumba together.

The next day I walked like Ann Margaret. I liked using my muscles in a new way, the big, wide swing, the twist in my waist. I liked invading the space around me, on this side and that. This was my first foray into dance.

You look like a duck, Three-of-Six said. Stupid … retard … all the typical big-sister things.

Other things were said as well. Also yelled. If you want to know the truth, it was a shock. Not so much what was said as the out-of-the-blue, disproportionate-ness of the response. How are you supposed to be a good girl and stay out of trouble when merely walking across the dining room inspires such a storm?

I understand my mother’s concern: This is not appropriate behavior for a four-year-old. If it were my daughter, I would want her to stop. What might the neighbors suspect? What dangerous attention might she attract? And really, what kind of child draws attention to herself in such a way? Wouldn’t you say whatever was necessary to get her to stop?

At this late date, I would like to interject: I was not trying to draw attention; I was just being my weird, artsy, experiential, experimental, self-absorbed self.

Nevertheless.

It worked. All of it did. The wonder and the shaming.

I fell in love with my hips and my body power and remained defiantly, covertly, so. Even when the fashion models were sticks, even when the boys called me Hippy, even when I studied ballet, even when I got skinny, even though Levi's never fit right, even though I walked like a tin soldier, even though construction workers’ lewd comments shamed me all over again, even when, even though ….

Ask any woman: What is new under the sun?

Thus another woman’s lifelong relationship—fascinating and problematic as any lifelong relationship can be—with her body begins.

Liberty Lies in the Heart

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it…

What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women?

It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow.

A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right;

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women;

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias;

The spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded;

The spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten:

That ... the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

Judge Learned Hand, 1944

Blessings, my friends. May we all live up to the ideals of the liberty we cherish. With love, One Heart Dancing

Argentine Tango Music Legends Make Beautiful Music Still

Argentine tango veterans revive glory days
By Jack Chang McClatchy Newspapers

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — As a sold-out crowd in Buenos Aires' historic opera house erupted in applause, veteran tango singer Virginia Luque took the stage backed by some of her country's greatest musicians.

The applause trailed off, and a few flirtatious whistles rang out. The 78-year-old was used to such attention, having starred in nearly two dozen tango-themed movies since the 1940s.

Nonetheless, Luque looked moved by the response and purred back to her invisible admirers, "Todavia, puedo." "I still can." She and the rest of the band went on to prove just that during an epic rendition of the tango classic "Buenos Aires Song."

Since forming five years ago, this super-group of tango legends called the Cafe de los Maestros has shown the world that its musical powers remain as potent as ever as its members passionately play the long-lost hits of tango's golden era.

Several of the maestros, such as Luque, came out of retirement to join the project, which culminated in the August 2006 performance at the Teatro Colon. With some members already in their 90s, a few of the maestros have died since joining the group.

Their work is featured in an award-winning double album and a just-released documentary that's won accolades at film festivals around the world. Many have compared the project to the veteran Cuban salsa group the Buena Vista Social Club, which also was the subject of an album and a documentary.

Musician Gustavo Mozzi, who helped produce the Argentine record, said the Cafe de los Maestros wasn't just about "rescuing" the genre's classic voices but also about showing off its continued vitality. About a dozen of the maestros did just that last month at a well-received performance in the historic Salle Pleyel theater in Paris.

"This wasn't a melancholic or nostalgic project," Mozzi said. "It's a vital work that's about this music's roots but is also thinking about the future of the genre."

For violinist Fernando Suarez Paz and the other maestros, however, the project was a bittersweet affair. Many of them hadn't seen each other in decades and were conscious that this could be their last time working together, they said.

"This is paying homage to these people not when they've already died but while they're still here," said Suarez Paz, 67, who's played with luminaries such as tango composers Astor Piazzolla and Jose Libertella. "We want to enjoy them in the last years of their lives."

The group was the brainchild of Gustavo Santaolalla, the California-based, Argentine-born musician who's found international success since leaving his home country in 1978. He's won two best soundtrack Academy Awards and has produced the albums of some of Latin America's biggest stars.

In starting the Cafe de los Maestros, Santaolalla wanted to capture the allure of tango during the mythical 1940s and 1950s, when Juan Peron was the president and the music was the country's most popular genre.

Santaolalla recruited Buenos Aires-based Mozzi to help out, and the two went looking for the musicians behind those classic songs, in Argentina and in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo across the River Plate.

They found a hall of fame of tango stars, such as legendary player Leopoldo Federico, who wrote some of tango's greatest songs but hadn't performed regularly onstage in decades.

To honor the music's African roots, Mozzi and Santaolalla invited Uruguayan singer Lagrima Rios into the studio, a black musician who sings to tango and to the percussive, Uruguayan genre candombe.

"We wanted to rescue the voices that were the founders of tango and were fundamental to the story of this genre," Mozzi said.

The pair also sought to revive the genre's most beloved tunes, many of which were long lost and available only on scratchy vinyl recordings.

They asked conductor and piano player Osvaldo Requena to transcribe nearly two dozen songs from the old records, a task that consumed endless hours.

"Some of this music hadn't been played in a long time," Requena said. "It was like remembering a system of life that's not there anymore and friends who are no longer with us."

Even as the Cafe de los Maestros worked to rescue the history, more of it was disappearing.

Rios and two other maestros passed away after the group finished recording in 2004. The Teatro Colon, one of the world's greatest opera houses, closed indefinitely for renovations shortly after the group performed there.

That sense of loss, however, seemed to feed the musicians, Suarez Paz said.

"Tango isn't happy music," he said. "It comes from melancholy."

For the film's director, Miguel Kohan, watching the maestros at work conjured images of a lost world unknown to most Argentines — including himself — of tango orchestras broadcast by radio across Buenos Aires and of giant tango clubs crowded with dancing couples.

The film, which doesn't yet have a U.S. release date but is scheduled to open in the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Brazil and elsewhere, depicts that world through old photos and clips and tales told by the maestros as they walk the streets of the Argentine capital. And, of course, the songs live there, with their tales of doomed tango dancers, Carnaval revelers and cafe intrigues.

"Tango has its own cultural system, with its own codes and its own universe," Kohan aid. "It was a discovery, or a rediscovery for me, and I feel privileged to have been there."

Men Are Easy

I am working on musicality. Never mind with whom.

Slip into a character, the lead says.

I consider the options. I am a ham; I love to perform for myself. Also, I am a writer; I have centuries of characters to choose from.

The music begins. I can't decide.

Audrey, I say, who do you like? Answer quick! Before I finish the thought...

Audrey tilts her head in the direction of her alter ego.

Really? I say. Are you sure?

Do it! she says. She sounds like Julio Balmaceda, her eye twinkles like his.

OK, I say.

The music grows fulsome.

I channel my inner Sophia Loren.

Mmmmm, my partner murmurs.

You poor, sweet thing. You never stand a chance against us.

La jumba!