Observations on Dancing with Successful Women

               As a tango dancer in America, I have had the opportunity to lead many women in the dance who are very successful in their field of professional endeavor. How do I know? They tell me. I know this sounds vain on their part but I think it is a therapeutic statement they must make before they can free themselves to our connection; tango is all about connection.

               Of these women there are two types: those who’ve earned their position through hard work and those who haven’t. Tango is a very difficult grace to acquire and if you haven’t learned how to toil efficiently then you aren’t going to be very good at it. As you may guess, I find my dances with the women who’ve earned their accolades through dedication and persistence, the most rewarding.

               The most vivid one I can recollect is a woman I’ll call Baba Ganoush. From what I can tell she leads a department for a large medical facility. It took her weeks to give up trying to get me to comprehend how rare it was for her to have to take ‘orders’ from a man.

               “I’m not issuing commands,” I would say, “I’m leading. This is not work.”

               I could tell she was very frustrated at my lack of comprehension of her professional clout but she was also delighted that from me she would receive no flowery flirtatious compliments unless she did well and that she would receive them in the form of my approval which would be discerned through body language and maybe a little smile…or a big smile and an exclamation if she was an extremely good girl! LOL!

               Never is there any sexual energy in these unions. Always there is a thirst for true sensuality. She needs to know that I feel the music and that I appreciate her skills. She is very aware of her boundaries and she wants me to take her there and past them just a little ways.

               It is there, outside the place with which she is familiar, that I perceive a sense of relief just before she pulls down the blinds on the window I have opened into her soul. In writing this I think I know now what it is that she doesn’t want me to see: her vulnerability.

               The successful woman who has arrived at her position through ‘other’ means, means that I’ll not ponder but I am sure you will, this woman is rarely a delight to encounter. Frequently, out of pity, I’ll risk a second attempt at a tanda and sometimes I am rewarded with the feeling that we could dance well together if we worked hard at it. She makes me aware of ‘how lucky’ I am usually in the first few moments of our embrace and then it’s an eternity to the cortina; an eternity filled with headlocks and frequent gasps for air and struggles for balance.

               I find tango very therapeutic. I am sure the aforementioned ladies are seeking the same therapy and it makes me wonder if they’re not just as wounded as I am.  As I think about this situation it gives me a sense of self-worth, that what these women need in life is me. My lack of education and my pretension to attempt to lead such a complex dance gives me all the tools I need to break through to them and in return, also satisfy something within myself. Just exactly what it is within me that they satisfy is a thought for another day.

Homosexuality, Same Sex Couples and Tango

                I believe it is time to write a piece about these subjects. Hopefully my thoughts will be accepted for what they are: my thoughts and not the law or an injustice of any kind.

               Dancing in Albuquerque this past weekend with my partner, a girl:-), a beautiful, wonderful woman and a tanguera of exquisite abilities, I happened to get a chance to dance with another woman who usually dances with women. Lady X, no, not Lady X, no one but Lady X can be Lady X…Lady B, yes, Lady B is a frequent partner of mine and a woman with whom I’ve always shared at least one or two intimate tandas with during the course of a practica or a milonga.

               In describing her to my partner I related that she usually prefers to dance with women. After the milonga, my girlfriend said she could definitely see Lady B had a lot of masculine energy and I had to admit that I didn’t see it. As I thought about our previous encounters, Lady B and myself, I couldn’t remember ever feeling anything other than the joy of our embrace and maybe the occasional frustration at our inability to move together gracefully as one person.

               As I showered this morning, I couldn’t help wondering about what I truly believed about same-sex couples, homosexuality and tango, and I thought it might be of interest to my readers so I will attempt to express those thoughts to you at this time.

               I think homosexuality is a complex subject but at its core I am certain it is all about a desire to masturbate with a member of the same sex. This has nothing to do with tango for tango is not masturbation, it is kind of like foreplay and ‘afterplay’. (If no one has copyrighted ‘afterplay’ yet, I claim it for myself!)

               I am not against gay marriage but I believe it should be like all marriages and be based on love, not on masturbation, as there is often very little sex within many marriages after the first couple of years. As with heterosexual marriages, one person shall be designated as the obvious beneficiary of the current legal system in the event of a divorce. This caveat will give at least one member of the union a valid reason to seriously consider the consequences of the commitment he or she is about to make.  If I get to make the rules, then I chose for the advantage to go to the younger of the pair.

               In my six years of tango experience I’d have to say this dance is a lesbian’s dream come true. It is entirely acceptable for women to dance with women at practica or in a milonga. I have yet to experience the sight of a mano y mano couple that is not greeted with a significantly loud silence at any milonga. I don’t think many seasoned tangueros find themselves threatened by the presence of two men dancing but it is quite unusual.

               I have seen two heterosexual men dance together with passion and exuberance and thoroughly enjoyed the performance but the exhibition was always presented in a comical light; when there is no comedy there is often unease. Why that is, I don’t know nor will I attempt an explanation.

               I make these observations from having danced frequently in NYC and Philadelphia, as well as a few brief times in Washington D.C., Atlanta, Charlotte, Austin, San Antonio, Albuquerque and San Antonio.

               As I’ve said before, when I first started dancing I was extremely homophobic. I am not nearly as homophobic as I used to be but I am still not comfortable with the thought of dancing with another man.

               Tango may be a dream come true for lesbians but I am not sure that all woman-on-woman couples are homosexuals. In fact, I think most are heterosexuals encounters of tangueras making do with the resources they have in light of the fact that there are often very few leaders, or very few competent leaders. I am sure many women, after realizing how difficult it is to become proficient in tango without the use of a skilled leader, take it upon themselves to learn the role just as men did in the old days of tango when the opposite was true of followers: few were to be found.

               I don’t think many people turn to tango because they are looking for a place to express their sexuality. The reason many of us arrive at this dance is because we are spiritually and emotionally wounded and we come seeking comfort in the embrace of another human being. Whether or not that embrace comes from a man or a woman I don’t think matters.

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

 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

               

A Milonga Full of Frogs

                No, not a milonga avec les indigènes de la France, LOL, je fais semblant, mais non, I am talking about your everyday milonga and its all-too-often maligned leaders who are new to the dance. I know, how dare I advocate on behalf of my fellow hillbilly tangueros against a culture engaged in such a sophisticated form of artistic expression. Here’s how:-D

               Tango is not an elite club available to only the ‘highly evolved’ and the overly educated. It is an import from a country whose leadership has brought it to the brink of third world status. It came in as a stowaway on a ship and crawled ashore like a rat on a rope bringing an infectious fever to the masses; it was not heralded in on the shoulders of ten lords leaping. Tango is a dance by which everybody can share in the joy and misery of being a human being; it is not too proud to refuse entrance even to the lowliest of souls and it is quite capable of making any one of us feel like we’ve passed through the gates of heaven.

               Recently I had the opportunity to observe tangueras participating in the ritualistic destruction of a man’s character and could not help but feel a huge amount of sympathy for the victim of their verbal onslaught. He was not polished, nor was he refined. He drove a great distance to attend the milonga and did not profess to possess any degrees or pedigrees denoting a higher social standing worthy enough to invite them onto the dance floor.  

               I recognized him the moment we introduced ourselves to each other: he was me, minus six years of tango experience. He was not relaxed but he was not ready to bolt for the door, either. Like me of yore he held his ground, spoke little and in the end added a few more lovely dances to his memories of tango.

               I’ve noticed many men in his predicament. They are just men attempting to better themselves and find solace in this wonderful pastime. Most often they don’t hear the sniping when it happens but they are still aware of it. It is like when someone is staring at you and you know it, even though you haven’t looked around to verify what your ‘third eye’ tells you is true.

               We men are all just frogs in a pond until we gain the vocabulary necessary to converse with many women through the language of dance. We could never manage to make it to that infamous fairy tale kiss from the princess if there wasn’t one consistent tanguera looking after us and shepherding us through the portal to the tango rite of passage. She is the hostess, our savior, the woman who always says ‘yes’ to at least one of our invites. She is the woman who manages to convey an emotion of sincere gratitude even when we are fumbling through a movement as simple as the back ocho. It is the hostess who can tell the future, who sees our dedication and knows we are truly princes on the inside. If it was not for the hostess tango would not have survived its second coming.

               I do not expect the lesser ladies to give up their cherished traditions of playing with the reputations of the males: it is human nature. They are obstacles that men like us must learn to jump over, to rise above, in order to become true leaders of the dance. It is because of them, not in spite of them that we learn how to project a masculine chest for the follower to look to for our intention.

               We may be frogs but men are very sensitive. We experience emotions so intense that women are always trying to get us to talk about them even though they profess to be the only half of our species capable of feelings. Men are by far superior in expressing their sentiments but we refrain from such activity or risk damage to our machismo. It is our ability to express our inner stirrings which entitles us to the role of the lead. We feel the emotion in the song and translate it into movement. It is the expression of our feelings through the dance that gives women such joy because it is something they have waited so long to hear. 

               So go ahead, all you ladies snickering at our futile attempts to hop out of the water and onto the land, take your best shot. We frogs will take that bullet and fire it right back at you in the form of a kiss…and we know you’re going to like it;-)

 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

Cabeceo and Our Fear of Rejection

     Fear of rejection seems to be a common theme in many of the conversations I have with other milongueros. While participating in a tango workshop this weekend, it occurred to me that the reason a great number of us dance tango is because we believe it is best to confront that horror directly. Putting ourselves in a position where we are vulnerable to multiple rejections from members of the opposite sex, seems to be a homeopathic cure for something we may perceive as an emotional weakness; it is a remedy where poison is treated by introducing it to a greater poison.

     Many times in my life I’ve confronted my fears in this manner. I assaulted my acrophobia with a brief career as a rock climber. When I was a young whitewater kayaker, I constantly put myself on waters that were increasingly more dangerous until one day I found myself in the middle of the North Atlantic on a 40’ sailboat in a force nine gale and 35’ seas. In my journeys I struggled to discern if my fear was a natural activation of the need to flee to safety or a state of anxiety arising from a sudden absence of comfort.

     Eventually I surmised it was not necessary to push the boundaries of comfort so far that it was beyond my ability to easily comprehend a solution. I resolved to let Life decide when to throw me into the storm and that to do so voluntarily was suicidal.

      So here I was, once again, contemplating fear but this time it was my fear of rejection from the unknown tanguera. The rules of engagement for the milongas after each day of classes presented a new set of boundaries I had not encountered before and, choosing to abide by the rules completely, I found myself delightfully afraid yet totally capable of fleeing to a point of safety if need be, e.g. a glass of wine:-)

     The organizers of the event decided we would strictly adhere to the codigos de tango(codes of tango). This meant using cabeceo to invite a lady onto the dance floor as well as dancing in a close embrace known as ‘milonguero-style’. Cabeceo is the technique with which a dance invitation is initiated and relies heavily on eye contact; upon acknowledgment between the two dancers, the man walks across the floor and escorts the woman into the line of dance. For this to be performed correctly the men need to be on the opposite side of the room from the ladies.

     I normally don’t rely solely on cabeceo but this weekend I forced myself to use it and nothing else. To be honest, if I didn’t have a date that I am EXTREMELY interested in, I don’t think I would have made it but I did. From the discussions I had with my partner and with other tangueras I was able to derive a topic for this week’s blogpost.

     Friday night was easy because we arrived late and I mostly danced with ladies I knew. I think I only invited two strangers to the floor before the DJ was announcing, “Last Tanda!”

     On Saturday, given the advantage of having introduced myself and my tango skills to a number of tangueras during the course of the day’s classes, I still was not prepared for the night’s events. The dancing started early, at 7:30 and the milonga lasted until midnight. My partner and I arrived late and ate, so it was 8:30 before I hit the dance floor but that still left a lot of time for cabeceo:-(

     By 9:30 I had already danced with my date twice and I had danced with the girls I knew and the two new ones I had met the night before.  It was now time to employ eye-contact with a complete stranger, not knowing if I would be successful or not. Girl #1 eluded my gaze for two songs before shaking her head to let me know for certain I was not going to succeed. I waited for the tanda to end before attempting another visual invitation and failed in the exact same manner.

     I was devastated.

     Once again I ran through the list of females I had danced with before, hitting my girlfriend up twice, who didn’t seem to mind at all. Then I sat down and retreated into an area of safety with a glass of wine. I was in a funk but the alcohol and the music improved my disposition considerably whereupon I gladly danced with all the aforementioned ladies once more as well as adding a new one to the list: the hostess. I’m not sure if she counts but I will take it because she seemed to honestly enjoy my efforts.

     By Sunday night everyone was getting good at cabeceo. I got shot down by four new ladies but I accomplished this in record time. I did succeed, however, with two other girls who got added to last night’s list and I managed to have a thoroughly good time until the end of the evening.

     I realized what today’s post was going to be about by 10 p.m. Saturday and began interviewing tangueras to get their thoughts on the subject of rejection before the weekend workshop ended. Not surprisingly, I seemed to get the best responses when we were eating, either at the desert table (where I spent a lot of time devouring half a dozen of the most incredibly delicious cupcakes I’ve ever encountered:-) or at the lunch table on Sunday.

     One woman told me that when the man breaks the close embrace she takes this as a sign of rejection. This was big news to me as it was something I did all the time; I love to let a woman flow in and out of my arms during the course of the dance and look for a partner who feels comfortable doing that. She also said that a man refusing to engage in close embrace was also the source for more rejection. At this I felt really bad because I spent almost my entire time in Albuquerque, six weekends of milongas, forcing women to dance with me in open embrace because they did not successfully convince me they were capable, in the first two seconds, of dancing milonguero-style without strangling me.

     In an emotionally charged and confidential conversation (but not too confidential for me to tell you;-), a tanguera told me that she believed men come to the dance looking for sex but women arrive seeking approval. Approval, she confided, gave her confidence that men still found her alluring and that in itself was a source of power as far as she was concerned. With that power she could still get her man to climb a set of stairs with a load on his back and that was all she really needed them for anyway.

     My final interview yielded those most startling insight of all: breaking the embrace immediately after the song has ended, especially if the encounter has been a most enjoyable experience for her, was a source of rejection for her and she felt certain the same applied to most followers. I thought back to the many pleasurable tangos I’d had and how I had done exactly as she said because I was so afraid of her interpreting my lingering embrace as a sign that I was looking for something in addition to the dance. WOW!!!

               So there you have it, my fellow tangueros, you are not alone in experiencing those feelings of anxiety when you are at a milonga, feelings that make you want to drown your sorrows in a puddle of wine. As always, I hope this blog has been a service to you and to the tangueras, as well. If there is anything you’d like to add, please feel free to comment below. Don't be afraid to offend me, I'm a big boy, I've been rejected by many of the best tangueras in the world :-D LOL!!!

Peave, Love, Tango

Kayak  Hombre


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

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

Tango Bitches from Hell: Lapushka: Little Paw, Warm Heart, Hard as Steel

              

               It never gets above freezing in Hell. Not many people knew that but Lapushka did: she was from there. Blagoveshchensk, Russia, is the highway out of hell and one day she took it and ended up in America dancing tango. At 47, most people’s childhood memories dim but not hers. She was in the arms of a tall man of African descent, dancing at a milonga somewhere in the Big Apple when she flashed back.

               In the village where she grew up....huh, she thought, ‘grew up’? She had never stopped growing up, she was not done; that term was wrong. In the town she no longer called home, New York was now her home, she had long since given up hope that she was a real princess like the one she portrayed in the class play at her school in grade two.

               At fourteen, she was becoming a woman although she could not see it when she looked at herself in the mirror. Yuri sensed it. He had been molesting her for two years, this man who owned the house where she ate and sometimes slept. She learned long ago the importance of waking up and hiding whenever he came home at night, drunk, looking for her. Often she spent the nights outside with the sled dogs who kept her warm while she worked on her homework by the light of the moon. Somehow, she knew that school was the path out of this place, out of hell, and she focused on it, disciplined herself to memorization and to the presentation of her work to her educators.

               At 14, she won a scholarship to a higher school in Blagoveshchensk. The night she left was the last night she had to cuddle up with the huskies for warmth. This was her one fond memory of that place and it served only as a reference to how awful her life there really was.

               In Blagoveshchensk, she excelled and was invited to attend a respectable university in Moscow. She was given a stipend to find an apartment and to buy food. Yagi, the man she was dancing with, led a boleo. She executed it with perfection and to the fullest extension she could attain. The spike of her left heel struck a man dancing close to her and her partner. It was Ethan. She would have liked to have danced with him but now she was sure that would not happen for a while.

               She liked kicking men. In Moscow, she attended self defense classes for the entire time she lived there. The only living quarters she could find was in a building inhabited by mostly Chechens. They were a hard and cruel people but she knew them from Blagoveshchensk. She could defend herself against the known, it was the unknown that she feared the most.

               By the time she was eighteen, she had developed a successful routine of study, self-defense training and traveling safely to and from her apartment. She was safe there, in her room behind the door with many locks and bolts. She analyzed the comings and goings of the Chechens in her building to discern the best times to depart or attempt entry. She wasn’t always successful. Each unfortunate encounter reinforced her need to do well at school.

               She liked to listen to music and jog. She scheduled dance classes whenever she could but they were always unfulfilling. She could feel the music in her bones and she longed to let it loose. She was now dancing with Kash, a tall man with tan skin and black hair. He smelled funny. He was not a good leader but he danced with lots of women and she needed to see why he was so popular. Fortunately, he had never been the recipient of a heel to the thigh so he did not have that memory when he decided to invite her to dance.

               Dancing was all a game of numbers, she thought. She noticed that men liked to dance with many women and, even in a city as large as NYC, she would eventually get to dance with all the men she wanted simply by making herself available.
               What she hadn’t counted on were the men. Not all the men, just some of them. These men were not the mindless, drunken slobs, prone to long periods of couch-sitting in front of the television that she had known throughout her life.

               Kash took her into a series of volcadas perfectly timed to the music. The sequence made her smile and almost made her forget about work, but how could she? It had been such a big part of her life, it was nearly impossible for that to happen. Work was certainly much better than school, she appreciated the compensation very much but it was demanding and there was always the threat of going back to there, back to hell, that place beyond, and before, Blagoveshchensk.

               Her partner was getting excited, she could feel it in his body. It was not the typical arousal she had come to expect from men. Kash was lost in the music. He was so carried away that he was having difficulty translating the music into movements and conveying it through his body language. She had to help. She had to guess what he intended to lead. Was that a series of promenade steps? She went into the maneuver and guessed wrong. She could feel the man holding her collapse like a house of cards, and then there was the inevitable disappointment: he blamed her.

               She knew it was not her fault and felt no remorse. She had experienced him and now that was in the past. There were more men. Many more men. There was work, lots of work. She thought about tomorrow’s presentation and all the players involved; who would be prepared, who would not be; who was the client and what were their real expectations.

               Is that Peter over there looking at me? He’s such a strange man. Something about him reminds me of subject number four, the cat who survived all the radiation treatments and made it to the end of the clinical trials. He was a mess and very accident prone. How did he get into that clothes dryer and how on earth did he ever manage to survive an hour-long cycle of high heat?

               Peterovich. He likes me. What was I doing tomorrow at work? Why does he like me? I’m not good looking. He can dance with many good-looking tangueras. Where did I store my presentation on my laptop? Where will I park? Somehow he reminds me of subfour. He called me ‘Lapushka’ once. He’s stupid, he doesn’t know any Russian. He doesn’t know that that is…..a silly name.

               He feels the music. Yes, walk, take it slow, I like that. What was I supposed to be doing? Of course we will dance another tanda, silly, we are not done. Yes, I like that. What? You’ve never done that before, but I like that, too. Why do you look at me that way? Like I’m a princess. Now I remember that place. It was awful. I’ve never told anyone that before, not even in my thoughts. I never want to go back. I want to stay here and dance tango.  Yes, that is what I want. I understand, you wish to dance with other women. Thank you for taking me back there, for making me forget about work, for making me realize, once again, why I want to be here.

              

              

               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

Tango Bitches from Hell: Angelina, Accountant for the Mob

  

               Angelina Peggilasso was an accountant for a couple of shady characters operating an import/export business from the 4^th floor of a building on 20^th St. near 10^th Avenue in Manhattan.  With a masters degree from Wharton School of Business she could work anywhere but she chose to work here. Seventeen years of accounting for various non-profits and the Catholic Church succeeded in changing her views on what kind of employer she wished to work for. After five years with Paragon Shipping Inc. she had come to expect that there would be days when she would have to experience bad things and today was one of them.

               She was ready for it.

               Her whole weekend was free and she planned to spend it dancing as much tango as she possibly could fit in to her schedule. Her youngest son, Eddie Jr., was getting married in a month and she had finally finished making all the arrangements for the wedding. Six months of planning, wheeling and dealing with different caterers, florists, DJs, etc. had taken a toll on her health and she needed to see Boris.

               Today Tommy Pantoni was being brought in to talk to the bosses: Louie No-neck and Joey the Noodge. It was she that discovered Tommy was cooking the books in order to finance a new girlfriend, a Russian stripper with expensive tastes. She didn’t like what was going to happen to Mr. Pantoni but she felt the Lovatto brothers, Louie and Joey, were justified in asking their associate to pony up some collateral to ensure repayment of the funds he stole as well as fork over a substantial penalty.

               The way she saw it, her employers were merely business men trying to control a large commercial enterprise engaged the avoidance of tariffs and taxes. They were middlemen in a huge chain of supply and demand who made a living through efficient management of resources. From what she could discern of the men she worked for, they were good family men with a solid work ethic who came in to the office everyday and attended to business matters the entire time they were at their desks before going home to their wives and children…unlike her no good deceased husband.

               Angelina knew everything depended, ultimately, on her. It was she that found legitimate ways to classify assets in creative yet innocuous ways that would not trigger the auditing software used by the IRS. It was she that went to the individual managers and educated them on how to use the cash registers and inventory equipment. She was the person who advocated for moderation and advised against erratic expansion and contraction of inventory which would invite unnecessary attention. The business needed her and this gave her one more reason to live....and to dance, as well.

               At fifty-two years of age, she had come to believe that women ruled the world. This was not a concept she had gained from her formal education. Things were different now for her. In her new worldview, men were extremely involved in the process of keeping things going but the final say was a woman’s. Sooner or later, the man who thinks he’s running things has to go to sleep at which time his fate rests in the hands of the lady who is watching over him.

               So it was for Paragon Shipping Inc. So it was for the Catholic Church. So it was for her husband.

               She remembered the night Eddie Sr. went to sleep for the last time. He’d just gotten back from the racetrack after losing all their money, money she needed to raise the three sons he had spawned. He was drunk and felt he should beat the crap out of her since they didn’t have a dog. He didn’t wake up the next day, it seemed he somehow managed to suffocate himself with a pillow. The poor man didn’t even get a proper burial. 

               She went back to school and began raising the boys on her own.

               She’d discovered tango about the same time she met Boris for the first time; Eddie Sr. had been in the urn for over fifteen years and the boys were now in college. She was doing okay financially and had finally gotten some expensive dental work done which required her to have her mouth wired shut for a period of three days. She took a short sabatical from work and decided this would be a good time to drop by her son’s new apartment and clean it for him.

               The building in which her boy lived was identical to the one next to it and she mistakenly entered the wrong one. Apartment ‘C’ on the fourteenth floor of this building was inhabited by a middle-aged Russian man she would always call Boris even though she knew his real name was different thanks to one of Louie No-neck’s wise guys named Pete Brovonovich. Pete followed him for a month and gave her a full report on who he was and what he did.

               As she left the office she could hear Tommy being escorted up the stairwell by a couple of guys working for Joey Lovatto. They were apologizing to their charge for what they may have to do to him later.

               She waited at the top of the landing for him to come into view and he recognized her instantly, a look of fear in his eyes.

               “Mrs. P.” he pleaded, “you gotta help. This is all a mistake.”
               She replied, stonefaced, “Tommy, Tommy, be a man. Take what’s coming to you. It was me that found you out and I think you deserve what you get. Shame on you,” she continued, shaking her finger at him, “cheating on your wife with THAT girl! Shame on you for cheating your employers.  And shame on you for cheating ME because the money you hid is the money I get paid with and I got three boys to take care of. How DARE you do that to me.”

               She did not recognize the two goons behind Tommy who quickly ushered their hostage through the office door.

               As she waited for the elevator to arrive she could hear the beginnings of the ‘trial’ proceedings. There was a loud bang, like a baseball bat connecting with a ball for a homerun.

               “Mother-fucker, you broke my fucking leg!”

               “That’s not all we’re going to break if you don’t give us some collateral to make amends.”

               The elevator arrived. She got in and thought she probably had helped the situation. The sooner Mr. Pantoni realized the only alternative was full cooperation the fewer bones of his that would have to be broken. The whole situation seemed a little bizarre to her but she thought back to her years working for the Church, hiding assets so they wouldn’t be seized by prosecuting attorneys as compensation for the poor young boys who’d been raped repeatedly, countless times and for years. Tommy was a bad man and a bad husband. He deserved what he got from the profession he’d chosen willingly.

               Her thoughts turned back to her first encounter with Boris. She had knocked on his door by mistake, dressed ready to clean: a red polka-dotted handkerchief to keep her curly, long black hair from falling on the objects she was cleaning; a drab blue skirt that nearly came down to her ankles and a thick blue stonewashed denim shirt. She held a bucket in her right hand that had a mop handle protruding from it.

               A tall, heavyset man with a thick black mustache, dressed in a t-shirt and black trousers, opened the door. He looked as if he was expecting her and he ushered her in with a newspaper that he held in his free hand.

               She realized immediately what she had done but decided to see how far this strange man would let her carry on the charade. Assuming he had mistaken her for the maid, she proceeded to sanitize his bathroom which she thought was not too filthy for a man living by himself. Thoroughly enjoying this clandestine examination of a man’s house done right beneath his watchful eyes got her aroused.

               As she moved between rooms, she noticed he watched her with a great deal of interest and soon surmised that it was something more than casual. She also noticed that she liked him looking at her with hunger in his eyes.

               After she vacuumed the living room as he watched TV, she rolled up the electric cord on his vacuum cleaner and held out her hand for payment. Reaching into his pocket he produced a wallet, took out a fifty dollar bill and handed it to her. As she headed for the door he spoke some words in Russian and spanked her hard on the behind. She turned to give him a stern glance, held his gaze for a moment then headed out the door with her mop and bucket in hand.

               She recalled how she felt that day leaving his apartment for the first time nearly ten years ago. It had been a long time since a man had looked at her like that and it felt good. Every part of her body, especially her behind, tingled with delightful spasms. Her body convulsed with orgasms repeatedly on the elevator ride down to street level and she didn’t have the strength to go to her original destination.

               She’d been going back to Boris’s almost every Wednesday evening ever since. It didn’t take him long to summon the courage to flirt with her more and more, until soon he was nearly chasing her from room to room with lustful advances. After three months they were engaging in full blown intercourse without ever having a conversation using more than two words: ‘da’ and ‘nyet’.

               They didn’t always have sex when she cleaned for him but he always looked at her like she was the most beautiful woman in the world and she loved that. She was not a thin woman and her sexual prospects had been nonexistent until Boris…and tango.  

               She loved tango. What she didn’t get from Boris she got from this amazing dance imported from the heart and soul of South America. Her life had been so hard until she had begun to dance. She hadn’t realized how badly she needed to do something for herself. Up to this point it seemed to her as if her whole life had been nothing but hardship, nothing but books and babies and bad men. Each day was filled with Herculean tasks that she somehow had been able to complete: daycare, exams, PTA meetings, graduations.

               Learning tango was the exact opposite of everything she had been doing for the previous twenty years of her life.  Each class she attended, every milonga (those places where tango was performed) she visited, only added to the enjoyment she was beginning to experience in life at forty-two years of age. She realized she had once more become infatuated with the concept of men. They were no longer walking, talking pigs swinging baseball bats and hurling profanities; they were now all like little boys striving to be understood, to be embraced, to be mothered and she had all the right tools.

               It was tango that helped her to understand that men were not in control of their own destinies. At the milongas she could see how easily the men were manipulated, especially by the immigrant women from eastern Europe and most of all by the Russians.

               Boris made her feel attractive in appearance. Through her education in tango she was able to believe that she was truly beautiful on the inside. In tango there was a connection that helped her see inside her partner, to experience his reaction to what she had to offer, not just physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually, through movement with him and in their interpretation of the music together.

               It was tango that helped her believe in herself and to see herself as a woman of the world, not just an American woman or a girl from New Jersey. Tango showed her she was unique upon the face of the Earth and that never again in the history of the planet would there be another one like her.

               It was due to tango that she finally got the courage to turn in that fraudulent charity she had worked for to the IRS and handed over vital documents of the Catholic Church to the District Attorney’s office that helped build a case against pedophile priests.

               She stepped out of the elevator at the ground level of the building housing the international headquarters of Paragon Shipping Inc. with a spring in her step, headed for Boris’s apartment to clean and to get a little loving from a passionate man. Then she was off to dance tango with many strange and exotic men in the large metropolis of New York City. As she walked down the busy city street she felt good and looked forward to the rest of the weekend…and to the rest of her life!    

             
 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

              

Tango Bitches from Hell: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms

               Rebecca finished her shift at Sunnybrook Farms Veterinary Clinic located just outside the New Mexico town of Farmington. It took all her strength just to make it to the end of the day with her sanity intact. Being the on-call vet for a busy animal hospital and living right behind the medical facility it was not likely that she would have an event free workday just before a weekend dancing tango in Albuquerque. 

               Menopause was not helping the situation.

               She was in the middle of having a hot flash at 3 a.m.  when John Rogers and his son, Tom Rogers, a couple of in-bred locals living in a trailer park in town, began banging on her door, the younger Rogers brandishing a shotgun.

               She’d heard stories about these two and their female Bullweiler, a bulldog/rotweiler crossbreed. Her Aunt Miranda had theorized the father and the boy were sexually involved with the animal and her Aunt Jane concurred. At twelve, Princess was ready for ‘the needle’, the term Rebecca liked to use for the process of euthanizing an animal that was too old or too sick to crawl off into the woods and die an honorable death.

               The tense situation lasted just a few moments after she shook off the sleep and got a grip on her modified Taser M-18 stun gun, capable of delivering 36 million volts of static electricity: four times the legal limit. She opened the screen door and lightning flashed out the front of her stun gun and into the head of the man wielding the double-barreled weapon.

               Her thick mane of grey hair unfurled like a luminescent blanket in the wind as she rushed into the surreal predawn moonlight. She grabbed the shotgun as the dark-haired young man fell to his knees and then to the ground, his left ear smoking from the electrical discharge. Instinctively she felt for the safety switch. It was off! Those mother-fuckers meant business, she thought, then she pointed the metal cannon at the dog being held by the collar in the old man’s hand and put an end to its misery.

               The taser blast was infinitely silent when compared to the sound of the 12 gauge shotgun’s explosion. Seconds later lights appeared in the buildings surrounding the hospital compound. Her ears rang and she noticed that part of the blast caught the old man in the hand that he was now holding against his red flannel shirt. She could see the whites of his eyes as he stared in horror at the now lifeless mutt.

               She straddled her Harley-Davidson XR1200-X and had no regrets as she recounted the day’s events.  She remembered hearing the gun firing once again as she tended to the younger man who had been tased. The father had taken his own life and his child was still in shock when the police arrived fifteen minutes later. All he could say was, “ Pappy and Princess, both dead. Pappy and Princess both dead.”

               Shortly after the police left she received a callout to the Walmart farm where a poorly maintained cattle herd was being loaded onto trailers by a young ranch hand she knew by the name of Mike. The livestock were headed for the slaughter house and the owner had left it up to the strapping blond-haired teen to assist her upon arrival in determining the physical condition of a particularly large piece of living beef with an unusual growth in its abdomen.

               “Will the slaughter house take this one?” He asked boyishly.

               Eyeing up the black and white Holstein, she told Mike to look away as she sliced open the cow’s innards with a laser scalpel and dislodged a full-grown jack rabbit and its nest from the bovine’s bowels. She could tell he was ready to puke while she hastily stitched up the animal, not being too careful since it would be dead soon anyway.

               She wondered how a full grown rabbit could get inside that cow as another hot-flash swept over her.  She sewed away, contemplating a sexual encounter with the young man. She remembered him looking her over as she shed her jacket to reveal her thin body clad still in her night garments. To her chagrin he was too shy to make a move and she knew better than to force his hand onto her body. She needed sex but she also needed her lover to handle her with the skill and attention necessary to a woman in her predicament.

               With a roar she turned off Rt. 64 in Bloomfield and onto Rt. 550 headed south. It was five p.m. and the hot summer sky was bristling with clouds, threatening to rain, but she knew it was a veiled threat, there was only lightning and fire in those dark grey masses of water vapor.

               With 100 miles of the arroyo, the high desert, behind her, she stopped at a McDonald’s in Cuba, the only town on this 200-mile stretch of desert highway. The town seemed barely big enough to sustain a franchise of this size but she knew there would always be a line inside. She waited her turn, ordered a McFlurry with sprinkles. This would have to sustain her until she reached the snack table at the milonga, a place where tango, and only tango was danced, later this evening.

               It took only a few brief moments for her to ingest the frigid, super sweet cream, then she was back on the blacktop that was almost melting in the 100° heat beneath her tires. As she traveled at speeds equal to the heat index, the wind offered no relief from the high temps but the ice cream in her belly was sufficient to keep her cool until she reached her destination.

               She stopped at the bridge in Bernallilo and jumped into the Rio Grande River where she soaped off the thick sweat of a working gal who’d just ridden a couple of hundred miles through a fiery wasteland. She didn’t bother to towel off as she emerged from the river, strode to her bike and withdrew a clean pair of underwear, cutoff jeans and a revealing t-shirt.

               On her cellphone safely stored in its cradle permanently mounted on the handlebars of her bike, she texted a friend. She called him ‘Blond Juan’ as there were several men that she knew with the same name. He answered back that he was just completing work on a new house frame in a nearby development. Plugging his coordinates into her GPS she peeled out of the sand and back onto the highway, leaving a cloud of dust in her wake.

               In minutes she was in the barren landscape of a new housing project under construction. She spied her friend on top of a platform that would one day be a nice home for somebody. She climbed a ladder and joined him. He was married but she didn’t care. It didn’t take her long to seduce him, dressed as she was, her lust nearly dripping like drool from her chin. She rode him like a bull at the rodeo, their bodies silhouetted on the platform in the setting sun.

               A police car driving by spotted the copulating couple, flashed its lights but did not stop. They both laughed and then she departed, satiated for now.

               She parked her Harley in front of a warehouse in the manufacturing district near the old part of town.  Reaching into her saddlebag she produced a flimsy black dress and a bright red shoe bag. It was quiet and dark as she walked to the entrance and opened the door. When she did this, tango music escaped from inside and made its way into the warm night air of New Mexico’s largest city. Once inside she darted into the ladies' room and made her conversion.

               Heat swept her thin frame once more, her nipples hardened in response to her biological transformation. She frowned as she saw them poking through her dress in the mirror. She worried they would convey the wrong information to men she had no interest in. Reluctantly she departed the lavatory and made her way through the warehouse's labyrinth of hallways to the dance chambers.

               The room was expansive and the ceiling high. It was too dark to see the roof. Huge fans hung from steel cables extending from the pitch black above. The center of the space was well lit where a large wooden dance floor accommodated a crowd of dancers, milongueros, people who danced tango, Argentine Tango.

               Most of the women wore sexy dresses and high heels. Nearly all the men wore black shirts and black pants; a few were dressed in jeans and t-shirts with logos, one sported a fancy suit with an outrageous tie.

               Around the perimeter of the dance floor, where it was not so brightly lit, were cocktail tables and chairs. She went to one and took a seat, crossing her long legs, making sure she did not make eye contact with anyone inadvertently.

               A tall, dark-haired man appeared next to her. She looked up and laughed, it was Roger McLane, a free lance writer. She could tell her laughter made him feel awkward but he didn’t back down from his offer. She was glad to be so far away from this day’s poor beginnings and hoped for a fantastic finish. This Roger, she thought, was nothing like the two locals with the same surname that she dealt with earlier.

               Argentine Tango is danced by a couple to a group of songs in the same genre rather than the usual custom of one encounter per melody. This group of songs, or tanda, was of the genre called ‘vals’, Rebecca’s favorite style. Vals, however, was not Roger’s forte, none of the styles were as he was merely eager to be the first one to approach this lovely woman with the pert nipples protruding beneath the fabric of her attire.

               She could tell he was distracted by her condition, and that he didn’t realize her appearance in no way was a response to his efforts or beauty. Still, she was glad to be on the dance floor and moving to tango music with a man who was interested in her. There were far worse places to be, she surmised.

               Nearly ninety minutes of tango, vals and milonga tandas with a myriad of suitors passed before she allowed herself to take a break and check out the snack table.  There was not much selection. She settled on a plate full of swiss cheese cubes, white grapes and strawberries. She also poured herself a glass of wine and tried to make it back to her table with a bottled water tucked under her arm. Fortunately a man named Nate came to her rescue and helped carry her bounty to safety.

               Not wanting the good deed to go unrewarded she invited the tall blond man of Danish descent to dance and he accepted. She was surprised at her luck for Nate was quite a skilled tanguero. She felt comfortable in his arms and he in no way seemed to be affected by the hardness of her nipples. In fact, he seemed quite disinterested and his aloofness soon piqued her desire to have his attention.

               With deft and dexterity she managed to ‘accidentally’ brush his pelvis with her thigh, plough her thick grey hair into his cheek and feign delighted exasperation a multitude of times during their encounter. He invited her to a second tanda where she continued her feminine onslaught upon his seeming disinterest. By the end of the third song she was pleased to see a visible reaction beginning to break down his demeanor and she coyly refused his request for a third round.

               Quite happy with herself and all the attention she was receiving, she sat down and enjoyed her plate of what would have to do for supper. She devoured each strawberry with absolute joy and savored every cheese cube by taking multiple bites from each one in spite of their tiny size. Each grape she sucked through pursed lips with a pop before biting down into the oval fruit to experience a cool and sweet explosion upon her taste buds.

               It was well past midnight before she began to feel fatigue, yet the music inspired her, relieved her of her stress, her burden of being a doctor in New Mexico’s high country having to deal with in-bred locals doing unseemly things to their animals. She felt like a woman again. Her breasts had resumed their normal shape and the men had long since given up hope that she was a female on the verge of sexual surrender if they only could inspire her to give up her thighs to them.

               She had to admit to herself that she enjoyed the attention. As she sat there contemplating the night’s roster of invitations and revolutions around the room with various partners, she experienced a release that she’d come to expect from an evening of tango dancing.

               She was not done yet. She could tell that of all the men in her fan club one was still interested, one who refused to give up hope that her appetite included him as well as strawberries, grapes and cheese. She waited until he glanced her way one more time as she was certain he would, then she caught his gaze and held it for a few seconds longer than was appropriate for a respectable woman.

               She was not interested in being a respectable lady, however, and she knew she had set in motion a chemical reaction that would lead to a series of events resulting in a romantic encounter. Slipping out of her heels and into a set of black sneakers, she departed, not bothering to change as she made her way to the exit with a timid Nate not far behind…the weekend, she said to herself had just begun:-)