The Fargo Dance Report

                Well, I’ve been here over a month and I have to say that Fargo is a very interesting community. Geographically speaking, it is as bland as a prairie town can get; demographically, it is quite surprising.

               There is a sizable Somali population here, as well as a very noticeable Muslim community.  Many of the Muslims are from India, Bosnia and Kurdistan. This makes for an interesting visual dynamic wherever there are crowds in this town. Interspersed with the fair-skinned, platinum blond, Nordic and Germanic ancestors of the town’s original inhabitants, are these brightly-clothed, dark-skinned people speaking Arabic.

               It has been difficult for me to accept the fact that I am going to be working here for the next several months. I tried to put it out of my mind by making the long drive to Minneapolis for tango on weekends but that hasn’t helped.

               I finally bit the bullet, rented an apartment and spent the weekend enjoying non-tango activities. I went to Minnesota lake country: Park Rapids, Lake Itasca (source of the Mississippi River), Detroit Lakes and Tamarac Lakes Wilderness Area.

               I brought my fishing pole and fished all weekend.

               Allow me to make a comparison between catching a northern pike and dancing tango with an anonymous woman. The former is like tying a thin string to a large stick, throwing it out into the water and pulling it in. The latter is akin to a rocket ride through the upper atmosphere and free-falling back to planet Earth.

               There will be no more fishing until I am at place with real rivers and big trout.

               I’m taking steps not to go crazy when the cold weather hits. I surfed the internet to find the local dance clubs and participated in their classes. I was invited to attend an ethnic polka festival but I'll never be that desperate. 

               There is a ballroom dance club that meets on Wednesdays and a salsa group that gathers on Tuesdays.

               The salsa group met at the local high school. It was not a big class but it was gender balanced: 6 guys and 6 gals. We stretched and did salsa training for about 20 minutes. Salsa training means moving to the mambo rhythm forward, sideways and with turns. It was very remedial but it was good exercise and reminded me of tango practice.

               The instructor has some Spanish blood, a rarity in this Norwegian metropolis, and he definitely has that Latin posture that so well defines their leaders. This posture is extremely pronounced in Argentine tangueros and I’ve rarely seen it expressed by American and European instructors.

               Ballroom Wednesday was very nice and also gender-balanced with 20 dancers. It was a very multi-ethnic crowd and I suspect there is hope for a practica group coming out of this one.

               I believe the multi-ethnic component is a necessity for a tango community and is gender specific. There needs to be women from other countries in the group. There needs to be men but it doesn’t matter where they’re from.

               I can’t say why this is. Maybe the immigrants are more driven because they’ve made it here from halfway around the world. I wonder if this doesn’t make the local women more competitive. Whatever the reason, I think this highlights the fact I really don't know what compels women to take up the tango.

               Women are the motivation for men to become leaders of tango. Followers need to be inspired otherwise.

               Here is something else I noticed while dancing with the Fargonian women: simply moving to the music using tango steps is intoxicating for them. I think this is proof that tango is some sort of aphrodisiac or opiate drug.

               If I were to compare tango to other dances, I’d have to say that tango is a 100 proof shot of liquor and the other dances are the equivalent of light beer. Unlike alcohol, tango is physically therapeutic and emotionally volatile.

               One lady, when she found out I was a tango dancer, enthusiastically asked me to teach her. She is married with young children, probably in her early thirties or late twenties. As soon as we switched from the mambo rhythm to the individual movements of tango, she backed off emphatically.

               Another lady found the tango movement very pleasing after she got past the initial shock of dancing without patterns. I’m not sure what she was thinking but it seemed as if a little bumble bee had begun flying around inside her brain. After our dances, she was all warm and fuzzy….and happily confused.

               I’ve finished compiling my next book How I Cured My Fear of Intimacy. I am in the editing process and am enjoying it thoroughly. Fargo is a great place to write.

               The book is about my realization that I had a problem being close to people and how it was cured by dancing tango. The book basically wrote itself as I blogged about my experiences with this dance over the course of two years. 

               The tome is not just a bunch of blogposts in book form. I had to rewrite many of my 256 posts, deleting non-essential material and weaving what I had left into a coherent narrative. Each post originally took four to eight hours to compose one or two pages of material; a lot of hard work has gone into the writing. Add another hour for the selection of each relevant post and mining it for nuggets.

               As I reworked each piece, discarding all that did not fit into the storyline; I was surprised to find how muddled my thoughts seemed to me now. Maybe that is just the difference between blogposts and novels. I think my readers put up with my fogginess because there are tiny flecks of precious metals worth the painstaking process of sifting through the dirt to find them.

               When I extracted all the pieces of gold, I was delighted to find that they were incredibly easy to read.

               I should be finished by the end of this month. Until then, I think I’ve found enough to keep me busy here in Fargo and I’ll keep you informed on the progress of tango here, if there is any.