NO GIRLS ALLOWED!!!!

               Okay, guys, I’m going to say what we have all thought at one time or another, "where are all the women?" If you’re like me, you’ve been to too many workshops with too many men and too many tangueras declaring, “it’s about time!” We all know it happens almost every other time. We didn’t get into tango to balance the gender gap, we heard there were too many women and that is just not true(unless it's a beginner class taught by Guillermo "sixpack" Argentineroni).

               I don’t think the ladies know how big a risk we take beginning an education in dance. Our machismo is on the line and it is a very delicate thing that we must take care of or risk a daily ass-whooping.

               I know the sign said, “NO GIRLS ALLOWED!” but I’m sure they’re here, so I better explain. Machismo is something that every man is assumed to have by every other man. During childhood, we learn that we can’t pick on other guys because they’ll fight back. When we get older, we presume this to be true of all men. This is what machismo is.

               If a man is perceived by other men to be lacking machismo, some will think it is okay to kill him, plain and simple. If our machismo is threatened, we need to reply in a way that re-establishes it in the minds of the men who may have heard the threat. Women learn, early on, that we are sensitive to this and have developed so many ways to take a stab at it that it has become an art form.

               Sesostris, the ancient Egyptian general who led the first army out of Egypt to the world beyond and found mostly stone-age tribes, wasn’t satisfied with defeating warriors in battle, he had to attack their machismo as well. All who faced him fought and died. Those who died poorly got a stone monument placed on their graves with the picture of a woman’s genitals carved into the stone: pussies!

               We all have been razzed by our friends when we admit to being a dancer. If it wasn’t for that one guy who always remarks, “Y’know what, that’s pretty smart. I’ll bet there’s a lot of hot chicks there and only gay guys,” we’d be dead meat as soon as we hit the street.

               We risked losing our machismo to learn tango, so we expect, nay, demand, more females. When I first started dancing, I always encountered another man with this thought in my mind, “Oh, no, not another guy.” When the guy/girl ratio has too much testosterone, I know I start acting like a little baby. I get really moody and feel like leaving.

               I’m not the only guy acting like a child. I noticed that the most skilled tanguero in the room can be prone to temper tantrums if he is not getting enough attention. I assume he has been the only leader amongst a group of needy followers for too long; once competition shows up, his good mood flies out the window.

               This moodiness can often be triggered by something a woman says. She might be oblivious to her remarks, after a lifetime of honing her ‘machismo blade’, and might not be aware that her commentary was cutting.

               The music at a milonga is arranged in a pattern of styles, separated by cortinas. First there is a tanda of tangos, cortina, tanda of tangos, cortina, tanda of vals, cortina, tanda of tango, etc. While I was jogging, it occurred to me to devise a scale that simulated a leader’s mood to match the arrangement of the songs.

               I will use three sounds to represent a man’s mood: 'woof', 'meow' and 'grumble'. Here is how each is defined:

               woof!: represents a man in his natural state with only ‘one thing’ on his mind – sex.

               meow: means the man’s machismo has been threatened and things could get ugly.

               grumble: is the leader’s natural state when he doesn’t have that ‘one thing’ on his mind.

               There are three songs in these tandas. Here we go:

               Woof!-woof!-woof!(cortina)woof!-woof!-woof!(cortina)woof!-meow-grumble(cortina)grumble-grumble-grumble(cortina)grumble-woof!-woof!(cortina)woof!-woof!-meow(cortina) grumble-grumble-grumble(cortina)grumble-woof!-woof!(cortina)woof!-woof!-woof!-la cumparsita.

               There you have it. If you are new to tango, I hope this helps. I’ve got one more piece of advice for you: don’t show up early. As guys, we are conditioned, most of us, anyway, to show up on time. During the first hour of a milonga, competition for the females is fierce. If you’re a novice, arrive at least forty-five minutes late and you’ll have a better chance of getting a dance.

              

Forgive Me Tango for I have Sinned....

     It's been eight days since I tangoed last....but it was a good one. I remember the last tanguera I danced with quite vividly: brown curly hair, sparkling brown eyes(got it right this time;), lots of Mediterranean jewelry and no ricocheting gancho! Hey! That's okay, all the other ganchos were to die for. If I knew I wouldn't be dancing for a week, this was the dance I needed to have.
     Hopefully, I will be at Andy's Practica and class tonight at Moravian College, http://lavidadeltango.org/ for more info. I've been sick and haven't jogged in nearly a week, so I've got to get my butt out there as soon as I finish writing this. I'll probably be dead tired but Svetlana is there. There is nothing a like )))-ɞɞɞ-ѽѽѽ rating to compel a man to tango. Woof!!!
     It was a good holiday season. Lots of Iezzoni's acting like...Iezzoni's, everyone talking at once, good food, video games, great conversation, too bad I was sick the whole time.
     I've got to study today for my interview tomorrow so I can go to Dallas as a telecom contractor. Lots of tango down there to write about. Virgin territory, too, I've never been there. So let's keep our fingers crossed.

River Tanguero during the Rut

     This one is a poem in letter form. I sent it to a tanguera. Once you read it you'll understand why I'm still single: I'm not gay, I'm just a whitewater river guide who wandered into the milonga. Enjoy!
   

     I'm just a frog in a pond and I like it. I am a bull-frog and a pond is where a guy like me would rather be, here with the spiders and the snakes in the lake. At the same time, however, me being a male frog does not preclude me from trying to get a princess like you to kiss me. In fact, that is right up my alley, it's what I'm supposed to do, law of nature and all that, right?

     That's why all us frogs are such good dancers....and talkers, we gotta get princesses like you

so spun around, with twirls and addle-babble, that you see the logic in giving the little guy with the green skin and big amphibian lips, a huge smacker.....smmmooooooooochhhh! Yeah, baby! Score one for the frog!

      But then there is always reality to deal with afterwards, specifically, an angry princess who's got no prince, only slimey frog breath. You can never get the kiss and escape the cannon. Makes a frog seriously think about quitting this game of kiss-the-princess. Her getting all riled up like that and coming up with all those ways to make my life miserable... perdon, miserabla. Oh, the horror.

      Maybe I shoulda stayed in school and become a fish, maybe my life wouldn't have turned out like this: always chasing princesses, making them so angry and all. I coulda been a bass, a perch, maybe even a pike!

      Oh, woe is me, the frog sitting on the lily pad in the pond, nuttin' to do but croak and moan all day, hopping around, swimming, diving, trying not to get eatin' by the alley-gators.

      Man, I like being a frog, it don't get no better than this. Hey, what's that in the distance, is that Cinderella in her gown, coming down the hill through the forest in her high heels?....that's the fifth time this week!

Poems: Binary Poem

     Here is a poem I wrote to a Russian tanguera I've always been delighted to dance with. Through tango, I've come to know many Russian women. It is a strange phenomenon in my life that I am so attracted to these girls but also extremely suspicious of them. I am a child of the 'cold war'. We were brought up to view the Soviets as the enemy through cartoons like 'Rocky and Bullwinkle'. When I hear that Russian accent, I always think of Natasha Fatale, Boris Badenov's sultry black-haired assistant bad-girl. I think it's sexy but I have to be careful: they could be spies:-O
     Oh to hear one of them say, "vare is moose and sqvuirrel."
     Without further ado, I present: Binary Poem(yes, the binary string is part of the poem)

Binary Poem
-
-
-
cars run on gas;
people run on memories.
driving in to New York City,
thinking of your perfect turns,
making me smile,
for a while...
mile after mile after mile:-)

regards,

Big Blond Frog!!!

00100000 01000010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01010000 01101111 01100101 01101101




01100011 01100001 01110010 01110011 00100000 01110010 01110101 01101110 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100111 01100001 01110011 ;


01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01110010 01110101 01101110 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101101 01100101 01101101 01101111 01110010 01101001 01100101 01110011 .


00100000 01100100 01110010 01101001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01001110 01100101 01110111 00100000 01011001 01101111 01110010 01101011 00100000 01000011 01101001 01110100 01111001 ,

00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110000 01100101 01110010 01100110 01100101 01100011 01110100 00100000 01110100 01110101 01110010 01101110 01110011 ,



00100000 01101101 01100001 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101101 01101001 01101100 01100101 ,



00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101001 01101100 01100101...


00100000 01101101 01101001 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100001 01100110 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100001 01100110 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101100 01100101 ;-D




00100000 01110010 01100101 01100111 01100001 01110010 01100100 01110011 ,


00100000 01000010 01101001 01100111 00100000 01000010 01101100 01101111 01101110 01100100 00100000 01000110 01110010 01101111 01100111 !!!

The Dreams of a Tango Gypsy

               I think God has blessed(cursed) me with an incredible appreciation for women. This is what drives the poet in me to words at 5 a.m. when I can’t sleep until I pen an ode to a particularly alluring tanguera.  I was told by another river guide, “I’ve never met a man so in love with women!” I think my tango obsession is the natural evolution of my passion for the opposite sex, going from the headwaters of the Lehigh River down to where they nest: in the cities.

               Last night I had a dream about a tanguera who has always fascinated me. I was working in a city building, tall, built of bricks. We were in an office, maybe that of a magazine publisher, with cubicles and a foyer with a desk. Every time I saw the woman she was dressed differently. At one point she had a necktie holding up her curly hair in a bun, red sweater, short plaid skirt.

               She ask me to get her coffee and we both went. Then she was in my apartment, lying on the bed in jeans and a tank top. It started raining heavily and my front doorway was leaking; water was spraying in all around it. My clean socks were by the front door and I tried to move them away but there were always more. I kept throwing the socks from the entrance into another room. This lasted too long. We had to go back to the office and hadn’t even gotten the coffee yet.

               Instantly, we were back in the office. I said I’d get the coffee but my infatuation had gotten it already and gave it to an elderly black man leaning on a counter.

               This is the dream of a hopeless tanguero. I’m not actually hopeless, I’m just in a vagabond state of mind. I knew there would be a terrific hole in my life after twenty years of parenting. I filled it with tango but I’m not quite done parenting yet, never will be, and now I’m laid off so I’ve got to ‘rediscover’ my role in the modern workplace. It’ll be awhile before I can settle down.

               I think that is why my front door was leaking in my dream: I needed to fix the door before I went back to the woman on the bed; it’s not like I didn’t want to, I was lost in a sea of socks getting wet from rain forcing its way past cracks in the entrance. She looked good. C’est la vie or c’est la reve, in this case.

               This is one of the permanent effects of tango: lingering infatuation. I think it stems from the fact that we each see the universe in a different way and therefore, we are each universes unto ourselves. When I dance with another woman, sometimes, but not all the time, I make a connection and am able to see into the universe as she sees it. I probably tap into her dreams and desires as well as her fears and idiosyncrasies.

               If I dance with a woman often enough and I'm able to establish that deep connection repeatedly, then I think a part of that woman’s essence lingers inside of me. Sometimes this happens on the first encounter: a good reason to take up tango. 

Here is a short essay I wrote on that subject:

               When we dance tango, sometimes, not all the time, but often enough

to repeat in hopes of it happening again, sometimes, wisps of smoke from the

ethereal fire of our souls intermingle with wisps of smoke from the

ethereal fire of the soul of our dance partner...then the song ends, the dance

stops and the smoke dissipates. We walk away, affected deeply by the experience

and no longer the same person...trailing a few particles of smoke from the soul

of our dance partner.

               So there you go, a look into the mind of a hopeless romantic, obsessed with tango and dreaming of tangueras. This can’t go on forever. Hopefully, I will be able to settle down in a few years and do some serious canoe camping. In the meantime, I’m truly enjoying the ride:-)

Baby Steps to Back Ochos

                For all you guys out there embarking on the grand adventure to tango, I will relate to you how long it took me to achieve proficiency leading my first movement: the back ocho.

               When I decided to learn Argentine Tango, I was enrolled as a student at a ballroom dance studio. I inquired about a course and they said, “Sure, that’ll be $1000.” Ouch! I couldn’t believe it but I paid it. It was late December and I began taking classes once a week. I also bought instructional videos by Fabian Salas, watched them at home and tried to ‘remember’ the steps. I put a solid month into DVD training.

               In January, I discovered a three-hour tango workshop being conducted nearby. I attended and noticed it was nothing like my ballroom Argentine Tango lessons. Also, one of the girls from the workshop contacted me and asked me to be her partner. I agreed and it wasn’t two days before she found a tango instructor teaching classes in the basement of her house. I went to four of these tutorial sessions and, again, they were nothing like the workshop or studio classes.

               In February, I took another afternoon workshop. The couple teaching seemed to have some structure and a goal in mind. When they danced, it seemed pleasing and uncomplicated. The leader told me he took lessons from an instructor in Allentown. Three days later I was taking a private lesson with that very same teacher: Sharon Hillman.

               After the lesson, Sharon told me I needed to start from the beginning and advised me to join her group classes. These lasted six weeks and were conducted on Monday evenings from six to nine p.m. On Wednesday there was a practica. She taught many concepts but the only one I seemed to have success remembering was the back ocho, probably because we did it back and forth across a gymnasium about twenty times each session.

               During this time I fired my dance instructor at the ballroom dance studio. She was devastated. I told the owner my teacher had no idea what she was doing. A month later, the owner defended her acolyte, saying the style being taught was a choreographed version of Argentine Tango called Fantasia, pronounced fan-tah-see-uh. So, technically, I was being taught the correct dance but not the style that I desired. I knew nothing then, I didn’t even know that I wanted to dance ‘social’ tango, which is a form of Argentine Tango.

               By the end of March, my only tango instruction came from Sharon’s BA Tango Survival workshop, taught in the basement of the Unitarian Church in Bethlehem, PA. At the end of that course, I could move to tango music but I could not lead a woman to change direction and step backward successfully.

               I kept going to practica on Wednesdays but I was getting pretty frustrated. Sharon offered another course and I completed it. After that, I felt somewhat comfortable leading back ochos but not every woman responded to my lead.

               One day, I met a tanguera from the Stroudsburg tango community and she talked me into switching teams. When I went to the new group, I found they all could follow my lead for a back ocho and I felt proud of myself. 

               My new found friends talked me into attending a milonga.  Once again, not every tanguera could follow my lead for this simple step: I was still doing something wrong.

               It wasn’t until December, a year from when I started, that someone told me what I was doing wrong. When I led a back ocho to my right, I was using my head but not my torso. As I danced with better dancers, they noticed something missing and waited for me to show some ‘intention’ before they moved. My good friend, Olga, pointed out what I was doing wrong during a practica and I made the necessary effort to discipline myself to ‘animate’ my torso rotation more clearly.

               Ever since, I have been able to lead back ochos for all followers:-) That only took a year!

              

              

A Short Guide to Leading and Following

               A big part of tango is understanding your partner. That task is almost impossible for a man because women are complex and his frame of reference is himself. This is pretty easy for a woman because men are not complex; if a man is a skilled leader, she simply moves in the direction he intends; if the man is a novice, she has to ‘improvise’. If you are a leader, your job is not to understand the woman but to discern if she is moving to your intentions or ‘improvising’.

               If you are a capable leader then there is nothing I can say here to help you get better. As I’ve said many times, I am not an instructor. You have spent the time necessary and made the efforts needed to convey direction changes to a female engaged in your embrace while tango music is playing. What you need are several counselors: financial, mental and physical. You’re on the verge of economic collapse, you are constantly embarking on guilt trips launched by demanding tangueras and your left knee throbs at night because you’re leading too many sacadas using bad technique.

               For novice tangueros, my advice is this: watch the woman’s lips. If you see teeth, this is not good, even if everything you’ve learned up to this point indicated this was a smile and a sign of satisfaction. This is called a ‘face’ and it means she is improvising. If you’ve invoked the ‘face’, you’re on your own. Sorry. You obviously don’t know what you’re doing. The best you can do is keep your mouth shut and pray for the end, any end, maybe even death, your death; don’t kill her or you will have one less person to prove something to when you finally do learn something.

               If, at any point you see her lips curl into something resembling  a smile, without teeth, don’t panic. Try to remember what you did prior to the change in state of her spout. This will take you about forty-five seconds. The song is now at least halfway over. Do it again, whatever it is. If you are lucky, you whipped out your ‘move’ early in the song and have one more chance to do it again. Wait for it….NOW! Okay! Now you feel like a hero. Quit while you’re ahead. Go home now. Recount what you did. Think about what you might do to add to it. Whatever you do, don’t modify it. You got this one thing, hopefully, someday, you will have another;-)

              

              

Women have a different operating system than men. I’ve heard many times that leaders should learn to follow and followers should learn to lead. This concept has nothing to do with understanding your partner.