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!

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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 …”

!!!

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Oh, what the heck:

Eeek!