Tango is an Argentine import, not native to my country, America. It is sometimes known as the dance where the man is the man and the woman is the woman, a saying so seemingly senseless and simple that we fail to realize its awesome connotations. American culture has become so dumbed-down that we can’t even define what it means to be a man or a woman.
Tango knows, and to all men I say, “You had better watch out!”
Let me tell you why but first let me tell you about Jolene. She is a woman who tried to steal the husband of the singer Dolly Parton when she was just beginning her music career. Jolene is a hottie with long, curly, red hair and beauty beyond compare. She’s a man-eater, a home wrecker and a relationship atomic bomb all rolled into one gorgeous package of feminine flesh, with more bumps and curves than an Appalachian Mountain back road. Jolene worked at a bank in a small Tennessee town where Dolly’s husband cashed her checks while she was on tour making the bacon.
The USA is a mostly uptight, Puritanical nation but there is one state where promiscuity abounds and that is Tennessee. You will not find a better smooth-talker trying to work his/her way into your pants or between your legs than a ‘player’ from the Volunteer State.
Once, while driving through the state on my way to New Mexico, I stopped at a minimart for coffee and gas. At the cashier station there was a young boy ahead of me, maybe 10 or 11 years old at most, leaning sideways against the counter, propped up on his elbow, his one leg hooked on the other like Tom Sawyer waiting for a riverboat, his free hand casually picking his teeth with a toothpick as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Oblivious to me, he chatted up the woman behind the counter, a grey-haired lady in her fifties or sixties, telling her how fine she was and maybe he’d come back to see her later. I started to laugh until I noticed that she was eating it up. He went on for a few moments before he recognized me and gave me permission to go ahead and pay for my coffee. I was definitely interrupting a pro at work and wondered what kind of life lay ahead of this young Casanova.
The scene didn’t surprise me much as I have known many people from Tennessee and was well aware of their propensity towards flirtatious conversation jam-packed with pickup lines.
What I’m trying to say is that Jolene was no rank amateur; she lived in a state full of expert adulterers so you can bet that Dolly was up against some stiff competition from the ginger seductress. The song, if you have not heard it, is a plea from Miss Parton to the bank teller beauty not to steal her man. Jolene is no lightweight so you better watch out when she is in the neighborhood.
For those who are not familiar with the tune, I include a link here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixrje2rXLMA
I have witnessed similar scenes play out in tango communities I have been a part of and most don’t have a happy ending, although there are stretches of incredible delight that will be paid for later.
Argentines are well aware of what it is to be a man and that means he is susceptible to temptation by the opposite sex. Argentine women know that they are the temptation; they may assume the role with relish and a style unique to each individual female. When Americans, or anyone else for that matter, dances tango, they all become Argentines, and Argentines have a penchant for l’amore like no other culture.
I’ve met ‘Jolene’ many times on dance floors all across this country and she is a potent cocktail that only makes you thirst for more. In tango, each tanguera’s embellishments are distinctly her own and may take years to perfect so don’t be disappointed when you find yourself falling head over heels in lust. For men, it takes three years just to learn how to hold a woman and many more years to learn how to do it well. It seems like such a simple thing and yet it is not. In comparison, mastering embellishments that can grab the wheel of a man's sex drive is ten times harder.
I think, but do not know, since I am a man, that a woman can find sex whenever she wants but not always with whom she wants. As she becomes older and wiser, I think she realizes that she has special qualities, vague and difficult to discern at first, that she can harness and, in time, refine to a great skill that she can use to gain influence over a man. To do this requires the dedication of student working on a PhD in the science of seduction in tango. The dance floor becomes her laboratory and her partners are merely lab rats who can’t help but think that the bed will be coming later while it is the furthest thing from her mind. All she is interested in is results and they have nothing to do with orgasms. If you find yourself saying stupid things, begging for relief or maybe even writing bad checks, then you can be sure that she has succeeded. Your anxiety/confusion/desperation is merely good data to be recorded and used later for the ‘product launch’.
‘Product launch’ is the beginning of the end for you, so consider yourself lucky if you get out of this with only blue balls and a boner that won’t go away. Sooner or later, Jolene comes upon a man she desires and ripe for the picking, preferably a man with a girlfriend, spouse or some other part of his life worth destroying. She’s spent so much time refining her skill in the form of embellishments that he will do all the work for her. He doesn’t even know what is happening until it is too late. I know this because it happened to me.
Somewhere in America’s heartland I met a woman, a scientist conducting actual experiments on humans to measure satiation. I met her at the Friday night milonga about eight years into my tango education. She was new to the dance and was impressed with my leading abilities, or so she said. I had about eight years of tango experience behind me at that point and was flattered when she invited me to give her a private lesson at her place. She was so beautiful it was impossible for me to say no, even though I was in a long distance relationship at the time.
Nothing happened the first two lessons but the third time she invited me to spend the weekend. I won’t go into details but we danced until she could see I had reached my satiation point then led me to the bedroom; we repeated that sequence for the next thirty-six hours until I had to return to work. In hindsight, I guess I should be grateful that she allowed me to keep my job, such was the strength of the spell she had cast upon me. I felt so guilty that I told my girlfriend right away the next time I saw her. That was a big mistake. We didn’t break up right away but it eventually became a relationship killer.
In the battle of the sexes, victory is defined differently by each side. Unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t finished paying for my tryst with Jolene. She happened to be attending the same tango festival as my belle and I. Somehow, she managed to ‘accidentally’ bump into my girlfriend on an elevator and made a point of apologizing for my unfaithfulness. She took all the blame but I’m pretty sure she relished the moment as the final jewel in her seductress crown for this is what Jolenes are all about: the exercise of the power of her allure and the work is not really finished until she has humiliated the competition.
I have seen Jolene’s performance many times over the course of the fifteen years I’ve been dancing tango. Sometimes she succeeds and sometimes she fails, or seems to fail since it’s all just a lab trial until a man succumbs.
I am writing this because I thought susceptibility to a woman’s allure destroying my life was behind me, that I was too old at sixty-three or had too much tango under my belt but I found that it’s not true. I fell just as hard as I did seven years ago but luckily I was merely the rat in the lab this time and not the subject of a ‘product launch’. Sometimes it pays to be single. Good for me, I guess, but let me tell you, I sure did enjoy the ride. I am, after all, just a man and no match for a woman when she’s being a woman.
