All Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

               This post is dedicated to all you ladies out there who leave the milonga early. If this is you, then you are probably wondering what goes on when you are gone. Read on and you will know.

               There is a woman out there who is counting on your absence. I see her at most crowded milongas, the Patient Tanguera. She is almost always alone and seemingly unaffected by the amount of time she is spending idle but it is not wasted time. Watching and waiting, she tunes in to the collective emotions of the crowd like an actor standing behind the curtain before it rises.   

               The habits of men are her familiar friends: we like variety and rarely feed on the same flower for the entire night.  She is intuitive about forthcoming cabeceos. Her deportment seems too calm to me, like the eyes of a crocodile protruding the calm surface of the water. I have to wonder if she has an extra sensory gland that is capable of making innate subconscious calculations on who will ask her to dance. Her demeanor is a testament to her predation skills. My mind races for an explanation for she is an enigma; I imagine she is a seduction addict who can ‘smell’ the imbalance in a man’s opiate receptor levels.

               Patience pays off seemingly on cue. The clock strikes eleven and all the Cinderellas rush to get home before their Cadillacs turn into pumpkins and the crows stand beside their eyes. A wave of pheromones blows through the room and suddenly she is sitting in the spotlight.

               For the next hour or so she experiences a series of high-quality tango encounters with mostly skilled leaders. Satiated, she dons her shoes and disappears in the middle of a tanda. She has answered her hunger but it came with a heavy price; there will be hell to pay at work the next day, a day that has probably already begun before she even walks out the door.

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REJECTION

               Rejection is tough to handle, even for me, a man who has been dancing tango for nine years. Men are big babies and I’m no exception. I’d like to offer my thoughts on this as it is a topic of constant concern to both men and women.  

               Once upon a time I shared several enjoyable tandas with a delightful woman. I noticed she’d been sitting for too long when milonga-style music began to play. I invited her to the floor but was rebuffed. She said she never danced milonga-style for some reason that I can’t remember; it doesn’t matter because all I heard was, “no.”

               I haven’t danced with her since.

               On another occasion she approached me to let me know that her refusal was only to milonga-style dances, not vals or tango. I told her politely that I understood but that was a lie. I did not understand and for some reason I lost my desire to dance with her. I’m not sure why this is. When I think about asking her to dance, I feel as if there is a big cliff that I have to climb in order to make the offer and I walk away from it.

               I get rejected a lot and I’ve developed a mechanism for dealing with it. I’m fairly certain I am not the only man doing this. What I do helps suppress the emotional volcano that erupts when we are snubbed by prospective partners. All our lives we learn how to handle slights from our own gender but it is somehow different when the opposite sex delivers the blow. It doesn’t matter if the refusal is a discreet cabeceo or an outright verbal response, a tanguero has to take it like a man, remain calm and be congenial.

               When this happens, I simply tell myself that there is no chemistry there and that I must avoid making the same mistake again. I tried and, for whatever reason, she declined. I recall past encounters when I pushed an offer for absolute clarification and remember that the outcome was never good. Usually the woman reconsidered and subjected herself to a tanda with me but it felt like I was dancing with a corpse.

               After nearly a decade of rejections, I’ve come to accept that 'no' may mean 'no' forever even though she may not be of the same mind. When I see a woman who has turned me down, the thought that pops into my head is “don’t ask her to dance” instead of “maybe she's ready to dance with me now.” In my mind, she is shrouded in a cloud of fog I call anti-desire.

               The process involved in making a dance invitation begins with an incredible phenomenon. It is a tiny spark of desire that originates in a dimension with which we are not familiar so I can’t say what it is. This tiny ember is quite powerful, much like the gravitational force that keeps us close to planet Earth, or the nuclear force that binds protons to neutrons or the reproductive ability of DNA. It may be ethereal in nature, existing somewhere on the macroscopic level out there in the cosmos or at the molecular level as a quantum object. Maybe it’s a spiritual thing. Whatever it is, I can say with certainty that it is remarkable and wondrous. It is like a flower, delicate and powerful in its ability to attract, an integral part of creation. 

               Rejection is a power almost as subtle and equally supreme. It is a chemical with cosmic/quantum properties that inhibits the ignition factor responsible for the formation of a desire to dance with someone.

               A constant topic of conversations with tangueras is about who won’t dance with them and why that is so. Men are such a mystery to women but we are also a mystery to ourselves. Rejection is a necessary component of the tango experience. We have to know what it feels like to be cold to appreciate the heat. So it is with being refused, each time we are rebuffed increases the amount of pleasure we receive when we are finally accepted into the embrace of another dancer.

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The Best Milonga in the World

Located on Penn Ave in that section of Pittsburgh that strongly rivals New York City’s Greenwich Village, the RJW Law Office & Dance Emporium is an enigma that baffles those trying so hard to be baffling. A tango gathering takes place here called the Unblurred First Friday Habeas Corpus Milonga and I absolutely love it. The Big Apple and Philadelphia simply cannot compete with this event as it is in a class by itself, a spectacle to behold, a sight to be seen, one of the Seven Great Wonders of the Tango World, even more wondrous than tango at the Temple of the Living Goddess at Heart-Path ­­Retreat Center in Pojoaque, New Mexico.

Friday night here is one big party for several blocks. Loud music is blaring up and down the street, vendors and local artists are hawking their wares as young, drunken, tattooed adults with purple hair and pierced everything wander about like the spoiled Americans the whole world has read about, envies and imitates.

The facility is a small, street-front law office that has a desk and a few banquet chairs placed against the wall. There are documents lying around and pinned to the walls, the kind you are likely to find at a place where a lawyer works: titles to cars, legal forms, petitions, etc. The door is always open except when Rich comes upstairs and closes it. I’m not sure why he does this, it probably has something to do with the legality of the whole scene but it makes the tiny space full of dancing couples too hot to bear and the door opens again as soon as he departs.

Downstairs there is an old bicycle repair garage that has been converted into a larger dance area that opens up to the back alley. There is an anteroom at the bottom of the stairs where there are two couches so dancers can change into their shoes. There are also two tables filled with drinks and food. The food, I believe, is always some sort of homemade dish of Latino origin: tacos, empanadas, enchiladas, etc. and there is a jar if anyone feels like donating to the cause.

The tango upstairs is always traditional and of the highest caliber. People wander in from the avenue out of curiosity. Sometimes it is a couple who hear the music and see the dancing and are inspired to be romantic. They join the crowd, realize that they don’t know how to dance after a few awkward minutes and even more collisions and then make their way downstairs to sit on the couches. There are other stragglers, too, that join the gathering, uncertain what to make of the place and waiting in vain for someone to approach them with a sales pitch to buy something or to join the club. It is a sales pitch that never comes and that, I think, is what baffles people most about this milonga.

Downstairs there is almost always some Nuevo music playing and an odd mixture of talented dancers and total beginners.

There is a philosophy that keeps this place going. I can’t really say what that philosophy is except that everyone is welcome and that tango is danced here and that the definition of tango is open to interpretation and all interpretations are respected. I can say that this place is a refuge from the party outside, where overindulgence is expected as well as the auditory assault of the loud music and the hypocrisy of the revelers dressed in grunge clothing mass produced in China just for them.

I’m not a lawyer but I think habeas corpus means that we are here for you. If you are tired of the false premises of the party and would just like a chance to dance and heal your bones, maybe even heal your soul, the Unblurred First Friday Habeas Corpus Milonga is the place for you. Everybody is welcome here, always and without conditions.

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