Repost:The T-D-H factor (tall-dark-handsome)

               I think I am going to include another piece of criteria in my ratings of tango events. I will call it the ‘T-D-H’ scale. T-D-H stands for tall, dark and handsome. This is a factor that we leaders have to contend with from time to time. I often react adversely to the extra competition that, in fact, ends up being no competition at all, I simply cease to exist until a.) T-D-H runs off with a beauty b.) sleeps with the sheriff’s wife and is thrown in jail c.) starts wearing heels and makeup to milongas d.) he moves on to the next workshop.

               Of course, if you read my blogs, my most recent encounter with an instructor with a significant T-D-H rating, was Charles, a.k.a. Carlos Morocho Gardel. I am a guy, so my impression of this man was that he was ugly and his hair was a mess. But what do I know? T-D-H is in the eye of the beholder and, in this case, the beholder was almost every woman in the room...and they all disagreed with me.

               So, let’s give this guy a rating and establish the criteria with which we determine a T-D-H rating. Since I possess no facilities for determining ‘handsome’ I will simply substitute the catatonic effect an instructor has on a woman, in its place, and call it ‘WKF’, wobbly-knee factor.

               Charles was not too tall but he was taller than me at about six foot. 1 being short and 10 being tall, Chas gets a 7 in this category.

               Charles is very dark, which I thought would work against him but I was way wrong, this was actually a big plus in his favor and he gets a 9 here.

               Finally, the catatonic effect he generated on the group as a whole, I would have to rate as at least an 8. This is my first time so I am erring on the side of caution because I could easily say 9 but not 10.

               So his T-D-H rating is 7-9-8.

               I remember talking to a female instructor and she said of her partner, “he says he has two jobs: one as a dance instructor and one as a gigolo.” So I guess I shouldn’t be jealous, this is, after all, what brings the women out to the milongas. Women are what bring men out to the milongas. So I guess it is a chicken or the egg kind of question and the answer, in this case, is T-D-H.

               Women and men are different. Men can look at pornography for stimulation, that is how we can survive for months at a time on ships crossing the ocean without any women. Sometimes I have to wonder about what is really going on in the space shuttle but now they’ve got women up there so everything is normal.

               I’m not pretending to know what stimulates women but I have observed there tends to be large concentrations of women present whenever the T-D-H factor is high. Take, for instance, the Nutcracker. Every year the bulge in the male lead’s pants gets bigger: one year it’s a roll of quarters, the next it’s a roll of half dollars, the year after it’s silver dollars! C’mon, when will it be the size of a third leg?! Whatever it is, I am sure the bulge increases the T-D-H factor because the audience is packed with women.

               I asked a tanguera if we shouldn’t merely find some young Argentine men and bring them to our practica and she said, “No. They need to be instructors.” That doesn’t make sense to me but I don’t pretend to understand. So there must be a fourth factor out there that gives the man validity. Let’s call it the ‘X’ factor.

               It is the X factor, I am certain, that raises the score a man receives on the T-D-H scale. Someone like Guillermo Merlot would possess an extremely high X factor and probably rate a 9-9-10. I assign the 10 based on my observance of his effect on the women at a workshop I attended. If he was within ten feet, your partner absolutely could not concentrate on following. Oy!

               Of the places I’ve been to, the resident tango instructor with the highest T-D-H rating would be Daniel Arredondo in Charlotte, NC. My partner at the time had a chance to dance with him and she gave him a ‘dreamy’ rating. This from a woman who only rates men as ‘good’ or ‘not good’.  I’m not going to go out on a limb and give him a rating. I’m only going to say to the guys, if you want to make your girlfriend happy, bring her to Charlotte for a private lesson with this guy. I’m sure he’ll be booked for Valentine’s Day.

               I end this tirade with some advice for tangueros. Be aware of the T-D-H factor. When it is present and in its most potent form, you cannot compete with it. The best you can hope for is for the tangueras to be thinking of ‘him’ and dancing with you. A new day will dawn and he will be gone.  For them there is always another workshop or another milonga to attend.


Note: Check out my new book on Amazon: Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure.

(For a more in-depth looking into the mind of the Kayak Hombre and his thoughts on tango, buy his book: River Tango, now available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/River-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1453865527 )

From the Archives: A love letter to my favorite Russian Tanguera:-)

Sunday, November 27, 2011

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!

Repost of "No Girls Allowed!" debunking the myth of too many women

               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.

              

The Power of a Laugh and a Smile

                Last night I saw a young lady dancing with an older man. She was good-looking, skinny and ebullient. She laughed; it was a deep, hearty and honest expression of joy and humorous emotion. They were dancing open embrace but I could tell her partner was off to the moon. He went for movements requiring a closer connection and fumbled the ball. She laughed again but it was not the same: she was bringing him down.

               Three weeks ago, I was that same man but I didn’t get carried away. I maintained my composure and played the role she expected: respectable patron. Nevertheless, my heart was carried away and the euphoria of dancing with such a sweet young woman lasted until our next encounter. She looked right through me when I invited her to the dance floor. I was devastated yet I understood. To her, a week was a lifetime. She is young and beautiful; her encounters on the dance floor are many and often are much more wondrous, to her, than the one we shared.

               When I think about it, the reason for my ride on that emotional roller coaster was the happy emanations from a young woman: a laugh and a smile. They are powerful things and not just when employed by youths. In other dances, they are theatrics, in tango, they light fuses attached to powder kegs that each of us carries inside, each keg increasing in size due to our need for physical contact.

               Two weeks ago, I was dancing with a woman about my age. We were talking softly when I made a comment that she found hysterically funny. She was laughing so loud I had to caution her to employ some restraint but I still felt profoundly glad. A warm feeling swept over me and I continued to petition her for dances the rest of the night; I’m sure I’ll continue to do so at future milongas.

              


Note: For an in-depth look into the mind of the Kayak Hombre, read his book, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/River-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1453865527/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369366756&sr=1-1&keywords=River+tango

Days Gone By

                When I was 26, I had a broken heart and sought solace working as a whitewater river guide in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. I was a fairly competent kayaker and had some river rescue skills but I was far from an expert by industry standards. I went there believing that if things got bad, someone would know what to do. That someone wasn’t there and I realized I had to be that person.

               Over the course of two years, I became a much better boater and learned how to rely on myself, not only on the river but also on the River of Life. I learned how to listen to that voice inside of me even though it seemed to be telling me to expect the highly improbable.

               Most of the guides went in the rafts with the customers. I paddled a kayak and carried rescue gear: rope, carabiners, pulley, first aid kit, throwbag, etc. It was my job to retrieve paddles and sometimes people. All the raft guides believed I would save them, which I might or might not do. To them, I was the person who knew what he was doing and could be counted on in an emergency.

               Tiny Andy McKee, mother of three, found out the hard way that was not exactly true. She was too small and the rafts, and river, were too large.

               To access the Hudson River, we rode the Indian River to reach to the confluence of the two streams. The Indian River is a raucous ride and Andy fell out many times on this section. Most of her guests would get tossed overboard and I would always save them first and her last. The Indian has two rough sections, each a mile and a half long. She usually swam at least of mile of the whole stretch.

               To this day, I can still hear her yelling my name, “Omar,” that was my nickname at the time, “save me!”

               I love the river. I love the water. I’m a guy. I didn’t look at her predicament in a way that, in hindsight, maybe I should have. I was on the swim team in college and swimming back to the raft seemed like fun to me; I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t doing it. I realize now that her lifejacket was too bulky and she was wearing wool undergarments beneath her full-body wetsuit and a wool hat beneath her helmet. The only thing she could do was float, or, in this case, somersault down the rapids, being dragged over rocks by the very strong current.

               We started rafting in early April, while there was still a lot of snow on the ground. By the end of May, Andy had had enough. I remember her last moments as a river guide at the confluence of the Indian and Hudson Rivers. She had just taken another long swim, yelling my name in vain, tumbling over the rocks and waves and now she was looking like a drowned rat.

               Her face was ashen-white. Her demeanor was that of a person who had been humiliated and broken. She was giving up and now she had to tell the person whom she had thought would be there to rescue her, that she could not go on. It was a poignant moment in my life but I’m sure it was a much more vivid one for her.

               I hid my kayak in the woods and took over her raft. That night, I hiked in three miles and got my boat, then carried it back out. That was the difference between me and her. I lived on the river. I had nothing to do but paddle and hike into the gorge to retrieve a kayak for work the next day. She was a mother of three. When she got home, she would cook dinner and change diapers. She didn’t hate me but I’m sure she felt I could have given her a ride on my kayak, at least once when she needed it.

               What I regret is that I treated her just like a man. Men and women are different. I think, if I had given her a little help, she could have been a good river guide, but I was young and still learning how to listen to that voice inside of me, telling me to this very day to save her.

               A year later, twelve months without TV, radio or other distractions, I could hear the sounds that were really important to me: my inner voice, the river and cars on the highway. I was a much better kayaker by then and the guides came to trust me to a much greater degree than the previous season.

               One cold day in the Adirondack Mountains, near Old Forge, NY, as our outfit prepared to descend the Moose River at just below flood level, our top guide, Jimmy Jett, a Vietnam veteran who’d seen a lot of action, came up to me and said he had a bad feeling. It was his birthday, he said, and bad things always happened to him on his birthday. He wondered if I wouldn’t keep an eye on him and his raft that day.

               The old me, pre-Andy McKee, would have lied, told him I would and then forgot about him. I was older and wiser now and truthfully assured him I would.

               A third of the way down the river’s rapids, at a section known as ‘Rooster Tail’ for an extremely large wave, sometimes growing to heights longer than the 18’ rafts we threw our guests in, I was getting ready to descend the rapids to a spot where I could keep an eye on the ten boats in our group. The monstrous wave looked very much like the tail of a rooster. Jimmy was close behind in his raft, his eight customers paddling four on each side and him in the back, steering.

               He didn’t want to get too far away from me, just in case he needed my help. I could have easily gotten ahead of him but that inner voice told me not to and I listened. Steering my kayak into an eddy, behind a small boulder at the top of the rapids, I waited for him.

               He wasn’t taking the usual route through this section and I guessed he was trying to avoid the rooster tail wave because it was easily big enough to overturn his boat. I was positioned, looking downstream, in a part of the river that was over 100’ wide.

               I saw Jimmy’s raft hugging the far left shore, a sheer rock cliff. This was a route untried by anyone I knew but figured he’d be safe because he was our most skilled raftsman. His boat passed me and I turned my attention to the other boats in our flotilla, looking for any other unusual behavior.

               Once they all passed me by, I turned my stern into the current to peel out of the eddy when I heard Jimmy yelling my name, “Omar!” 

               I aborted the maneuver and stayed in the calm area behind the rock. Turning my head, I could see his raft was trapped in a large wave called a hole. Holes are depressions in the river where the wave recirculates upon itself and acts like a vertical washing machine.

               Jimmy’s raft was being spun around clockwise on the surface of the water and his customers were all hunkered down in the middle of the boat, away from the outer tubes. The entire raft was filled with icy-cold water. If anyone got near the upstream edge of the raft, the hole would probably suck them out and they would have to swim through the rapid and then get 'dunked' by the rooster tail wave at the bottom. This was not desirable because it was early spring and the water temperature was less than 35 degrees Fahrenheit. A swimmer would likely be hypothermic by the time they were rescued.

               My fellow guide stood on the outer tube on the downstream-side of the raft. As the river twirled the boat around, he would run around the outer edge to quickly get to the downstream-side of the craft again. It would be a comical sight if the water weren’t frigid and the raft wasn’t in danger of flipping over at any moment if the river volume surged unexpectedly, as it often does.

               Scanning the water’s surface upstream of my position, I spied a rock that was closer to the middle where I could possibly reach him with my throwbag. It was a tough paddle, ascending the current like a salmon, but I did it.  Somehow, I managed to climb out of my kayak and onto a tiny boulder, without falling into the water. I secured my boat so it wouldn’t float away.

               There was just enough room on top of the rock for me to stand with my legs spread for stability. I pulled a three-foot length of rope from the orange cloth bag and readied myself to toss the bag end of the rope. The bag acted as a weight to help carry the line towards it target. If I was unsuccessful, I would have to recoil the rope and try again. A used throwbag is harder to throw and more difficult to aim with accuracy.

               With a heave, I tossed the bag and the yellow line appeared behind it from inside the bag as it flew towards Jimmy’s outstretched arms. He was standing on the boat’s bow, if the current spun it around, he would miss the bag and probably fall into the water. It was a perfect toss and the bag went right through his hands as he grabbed the rope.

               There was not much line left in the bag, another four feet and he would have been too far.

               Pulling with a steady pressure, I was able to use the river’s energy to steer him out of the hole to safety. He managed to make it to a rock where he stopped his boat to bail before he proceeded to navigate the rest of the rapids.

               Ever since that day, I’ve made a point to listen to my inner voice. There have been times when it has been a struggle. I resisted it all the way into my initial attempts at dancing but gave in completely once I found tango and have no regrets.

                In tango, the voice often says, “Dance with her again. There is something you missed.”

               That voice hasn’t been wrong yet.

              

              

              

              

Connection Depends on What You Want

               I guess I’ve known all along what I wanted from my dance: physical contact with the opposite sex without commitment. I don’t want to be lonely but I don’t want someone who will stand in between me and my obligations as a parent. It is a difficult conundrum to resolve and something I will have to deal with until my girls are on their own.

               I knew my great job in PA wouldn’t last forever and I’m surprised it did for nearly fourteen years. I got to be there for my oldest girl when she got on the school bus for the first time. I cried as I watched the bus pull away. I could see her sitting in a seat all by herself, unafraid, as the huge yellow contraption disappeared up the street with the precious gift I had worked so hard to shelter from the world for which she was now headed.

               Two years later, there was a repeat performance with my youngest daughter. I cried then, too. So much work had gone into preparing them for that day: teaching them to eat, potty training, preschool, getting them dressed, brushing their hair, etc.

               Now they’re both in college and they don’t need me anymore, they need my wallet. It’s good to be needed. It gives me purpose and I love being a dad. So what to do while I’m busy paying off my daughters' credit card bills? The answer is ‘tango’ but, if you knew me before I started dancing, you never would have thought I’d head in that direction.

               Yes, tango is a direction. I love the outdoors. When I got divorced, I spent all my free time canoe camping and running whitewater rivers in my kayak and canoe. This is in the woods. Tango is in the cities. What I love about cities are the people. For ten years I worked as a river guide, talking to city-folk all the way down the river. Now I am going to where they came from and getting to know them there. I find them fascinating.

               After five years of training, I’ve learned that the most important aspect of tango is the connection. What a person is looking to get out of their experience heavily influences how they establish the bond with their partner. I’m going for the Vulcan Mind Meld. I want to see inside my companion's brain and get to know her, feel her passion, her anxiety. I want her trust, I want to feel her desire; I want her to need me.

               I’ll let her come in close if she doesn’t hesitate; otherwise, it is open embrace. If she is uncomfortable in open embrace, I’ll try and move in closer but this can be awkward. I generally find there are two types of tangueras when it comes to establishing connection: those who hesitate and those who don’t. Both have the capacity to make the time we spend together in our endeavor a pleasant one or a test of civility.

               This is just me. How others connect depends entirely on what they are looking to get out of their brief engagement on the dance floor. In my conversations with tangueras, I’m pretty certain some of them are looking to dance with a man who is gay. I don’t understand this at all but I don’t think it is quite uncommon. I often get a sense that my followers are turned off at the slightest hint of testosterone.

               Some ladies, on the other hand, are looking for testosterone, as well as other things, like success in business, education or athletics. My guy friends encourage me to play into this stereotype and I often struggle with the morality of it: is it better to lie and make her happy or do I keep my self-respect but miss the opportunity for a great dance? There is nothing like tango with a tanguera who thinks you’re perfect marriage material:-)

               Among my male friends that actually are ‘perfect marriage material’, they tell me they are looking for physical gratification, first and foremost, but I secretly think they enjoy a lady with well developed tango skills just as much. I base this on the tangueras I've seen them dance with most.

               Finally, I think something all us guys are looking for is a follower who will go with us into a mistake. This is an intoxicating feeling, especially if she doesn’t acknowledge it but, rather, waits for the leader to continue. On the surface, the incident appears to be one of submission, which is what I think makes it so intoxicating for a man, but, upon further examination, the woman is merely taking the event as an exercise in patience, something all milongueros should practice by taking their turns with novices.

              


Note: For an in-depth look into the mind of the Kayak Hombre, read his book, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/River-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1453865527/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369366756&sr=1-1&keywords=River+tango