Should Women Ask Men To Dance At A Milonga?

Hooray! We’re dancing tango again! After attending several milongas, it is becoming obvious to me that the ladies are anxious to dance and I am getting a lot of verbal dance requests. This brings me to the topic I'd like to discuss today: tango dance invitation etiquette.  If you’ve been dancing tango a long time the answer may be obvious: cabeceo, of course, but we all know that this is not necessarily practiced here in America, land of the free, the place where men and women are almost equal and home to the world’s largest population of contrarians who defy all rules right up to their very last covid-filled breath.

Here is how I feel about women asking me to dance: I am extremely against it…...unless she’s extremely attractive or she's a friend or she is simply irresistible; other than those things, I really prefer to initiate the dance invite with a cabeceo, delivered with the utmost discretion. The use of cabeceo is an art, and, if applied correctly, does not affect the mood of a crowd because dance request rejections go mostly unnoticed.

I must admit that when I was a beginner, I found cabeceo extremely daunting. After I’d been dancing tango for five years, I took a workshop on close embrace. It was a weekend event with milongas after class on both Friday and Saturday nights. Cabeceo was strictly enforced and I struggled with it but grew to like it, then to love it, albeit seven years later. I now find the spoken approach to a dance invite to be kind of rude. However, as noted before, there are exceptions.

One of the nicest things about a good milonga is how I feel afterwards, it is a feeling that can last for days, even weeks. I had a tango dance with a tanguera just before covid hit and the memory of our dance together stayed with me for a year. Now that we are dancing again, I’ve come to know those feelings once more, but there is a glitch: I'm older and not necessarily wiser or maybe less forgiving than I used to be before covid. My memory of the night before is the same euphoria I’ve come to know and love, but a poorly executed verbal dance invite from a tanguera to me invades that pre-dawn sleepy stage of a night’s rest where visions of women dressed in high-heels and nice dresses drift magically across the screen of my dream theater….and it makes me angry. I know it shouldn’t matter but it does. I guess I've become a cranky old man.

I know women are of different minds when it comes to asking a man for a dance at a milonga. Let me try to present their arguments to the best of my recollection:

• The most common defense I hear is that she won't wait for cabeceos all night and will resort to asking men outright if she feels her butt becoming too familiar with her chair. She's put a lot of work into looking great and drove a long way to get here and she'll be damned if she doesn't get some dances.
  
  

• This next one is a brute. She never waits and is most annoying. I will dance with her the first few times she asks but I will put a stop to it before it spirals out of control and she is treating me like her bitch. She is the woman who interrupts my euphoric tango dreams and the reason why I write. One of these girls once approached me before the song was even over, while I was still holding my partner in my arms! I found this incredibly insulting and resolved not to dance with her the rest of the night or forever, whichever is longest.
  
  

• Then there are the newbies who must be forgiven all transgressions because they know not what they do.
  
  

  It is not unusual for a woman to ask a man to dance at other venues: there is little risk to it, three minutes and it will be over, barely enough time to smell her perfume. A tango engagement is entirely different: it is at least ten minutes, you will not only catch a whiff of her perfume, you'll have a pretty good idea of how long it's been since she showered last and what she had for supper. Not all girls are made of sugar and spice; tango teaches a man why the blind man knows he's passing by a brothel.

It is said that, in tango, the man is the man and the woman is the woman: what does that mean? I can't say for sure but I think it has something to do with the roles we are expected to play. For my part, I think I am obligated to be pleasing and respectful. It is also said that tango is all about the woman, so it seems that she can do whatever the hell she wants and us guys will just have to deal with it.

 As always, I write to expose the mind of a man dancing tango. I'm not asking anyone to agree with what I have to say, I am only saying that this is how I feel and I'll bet there's other men out there who feel the same way, too.

Peace, Love, Tango,

sincerely,

The Kayak Hombre

Not Letting Go

This is not a complaint, in fact, it is just an observation about an infrequent experience I have had with women who are new to tango. In my tango travels across America, I have danced with some ladies who do not disengage from the embrace entirely when the song has ended. She simply stands there, gripping my left hand with her right, her left hand still on my shoulder. I suspect this is not a conscious act. I can remember when I first started dancing tango, I couldn't breathe. I was oblivious to the fact that I wasn't taking in breaths but it was quite noticeable to my partners. Such are the mysteries of human behavior when two people join together to move to the music.

My initial reaction was to forcibly disconnect; not in a rude way, or so I thought when I was just a novice tanguero, maybe they did find it upsetting. Then I spent a year and a half studying the close embrace. Through frequent discussions with my girlfriend, I learned that the concept of ‘touch’ has an entirely different meaning to women than it does for men. Though I cannot quite say what that meaning for women is exactly, it is enough for me to know that it is different from mine. I must treat the act of embracing her with great care and not to come to any unfounded conclusions as to what she is experiencing.

I think this approach could apply to all people as a way we should all treat each other in all our social interactions. We should act as if we don’t really know what the other person’s experience of our encounter is and not to make any assumptions based on whatever biases we may have. This kind of behavior could do a lot to restore civility in America today.

After five years dancing tango, I learned that final impressions were just as important as first impressions. For the next three years I worked on finding the right moment to disengage from the close embrace. It is possible to ruin the memory of an entire tanda, regardless of how well you performed, by breaking contact abruptly.

I think the reason women find it so enjoyable to dance with other women is because they know exactly how, when and where to touch each other.  

I realized that my concept of the meaning of ‘touch’ had to change. I am not ‘touching’ her anywhere; she is merely settling into my embrace. Even though there is contact between our bodies, I am not taking notes on the specifics of which body part I am feeling, but rather, I am using that point of contact to find out where her balance is. My hand beneath her shoulder blade is where I see how she is connects to the ground.

The tango embrace is more than just two bodies coming together; it is a physical connection, yes, but it is also a mental, emotional and maybe even a spiritual communion as well. To find her balance I must establish a mood, I must make her feel respected. My frame is not so much a place for me to hold her as it is a room where she feels safe and free to enjoy what? Me? The music? The crowd? Who knows? I don’t. I can only hope that she is comfortable being with me and that I must work to make sure she stays that way.

I firmly believe that, as much as men have no clue as to what is going on inside a woman, women have no clue as to why men do what they do: they can only guess. My advice to any tangueros who may be looking for answers as to how they can become better partners, is this: don’t keep her guessing. Let her know that you enjoy the touch of her hands on your body, not through words but by your demeanor, smile honestly if you can and make eye contact. Above all, try to create a feeling of respect. For the next ten minutes, you will not be a man directing her backwards through a crowded room, you will be a place for her to go and to enjoy an experience that will reverberate back into you. If she chooses to stay connected to you through that awkward silence between songs, consider yourself lucky and enjoy the moment for what it is: a blessing.

For more thoughts on tango and life by the Kayak Hombre, check out my books available on Amazon.com. Special thanks to Lutin Wu for helping me redesign the cover of my second book 'Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure'.

Sexism in Tango

As I travel back and forth between my home in a small rural town in the Poconos of Pennsylvania and the large metropolitan areas of Philadelphia and Baltimore, I am constantly impressed with the accomplishments of human civilization. As amazing as all this is, I have to say that we humans are even more amazing. Our capacity to love and to be loved inspires us to create all this….chaos, I think that is the best word to describe what we have accomplished. Civilization is a network of roads and powerlines, a thing of homes and tall buildings, all connected by wires and concrete and traversed by cars and planes, boats and trains.

Yes, civilization is fantastic but people are even more so. In the midst of all the technology and construction, it is entirely possible that some of us have forgotten who and what we are, no longer asking why and constantly frustrated with how we definine ourselves.

How does all this relate to tango, you might ask, well, I will tell you. Tango is a dance where the man is the man and the woman is the woman. I first heard this saying in Wausau, Wisconsin, but I think it is written in a book somewhere but that doesn’t matter, what matters is that tango is basically a sexist dance, IMHO.

I know, to call something sexist in the age of #metoo sounds insulting but please do not try to think of that label as a negative term. Expressing our sexuality in this day and age is a dilemma for far too many people.

To illustrate this, let me tell you about my friend, Jude. He once was a woman but now he’s a man. I first met him at practica, a long time ago, when he was a she. As a woman, he was a lousy follower (forgive me, Jude, but it's true). I could feel the confusion within him as I tried to help him master the fundamentals of tango. It was all for naught. Eighteen months later, he had made the transformation into a man. This was not some simple choice for him to make; it affected every aspect of his life and his place in the community. As the mother of two children, I have to wonder how his kids handled his switch to the other side but for me it was a revelation into the meaning of what it means to be a man.

After his change, I had the opportunity to dance with Jude with me playing the part of the woman. I could not believe how easily he filled the role of the leader. When he led me backwards, he projected his frame and I could feel, quite clearly, where he wanted me to go. There was a definite sense of masculinity in how he communicated his intentions and how he interpreted the rhythms of the music. I was awestruck and happy for him; he was going to be a good leader of this dance.

He danced with my girlfriend next. She had danced many times with him when he was a woman and always enjoyed the experienced. Afterwards, she was quite upset. Apparently, she felt he was enjoying the touch of her body a little too much and she felt violated. I was sad for her but I took her offense as absolute proof that the transformation Jude had undertaken was real. It also reinforced my belief that respect for the woman is the fundamental pillar of this dance. This was something that Jude was going to have to learn, just like all us other guys did, or have been trying to do.

Tango is not a dance where two androgynous people make their way around a room, performing various changes of direction in the company of other androgynous couples doing the same. It is our sexuality which makes this endeavor such a fantastic experience, something that many people like me have found to be so addicting.

To dance tango without having to keep your sexuality in check is kind of like climbing in a climbing gym as opposed to scaling a cliff in the great outdoors. It is the difference between going down a waterslide at an amusement park and navigating a raft/canoe/kayak down a whitewater river. Without sexuality, where is the need for respect? A fall in the gym is not the same as a fall from a cliff, you could be seriously injured, even die. Falling off the waterslide is not the same thing as disappearing beneath the surface of a river where there is no air and no one to save you; you could really drown.

Respect for the woman in tango is what keeps us on the road to civility and makes all tango possible. We are amazing creatures, us peoples. We are so full of emotions, so capable of hurting and being hurt but also capable of enjoying and providing enjoyment. To dance tango, you have to fill the role of the man or the woman, it’s as simple as that. This is a dance that pairs masculinity with femininity, two awesome forces of nature, neither one better than, or lesser than, the other. Life is amazing, so open your eyes as to who you are and go out there and do some living. It’s okay to be afraid, being who you are is a daunting challenge but don’t let that prevent you from taking the first step.

For more 'sexist' writings by the Kayak Hombre, check out my 'sexist' books available on Amazon and Kindle. I'll list my most offensive book first, What Men Are Feeling And Why Women Refuse to Believe It's True, but there are others, just as sexist and full of honest thoughts and imaginations of a unique human being, me:)

Love Is The 5th Dimension

I think my computer is in love with me. I’m not sure how I know this but I’ve
noticed that it does not work well in the hands of others. Recently, I asked a
coworker to open the lid, it powers up upon doing this except in this case,
it stayed off. I told him to try again: same results. I took the laptop from him and
opened the lid and…..voila!

Love is a fantastical thing. It is my theory, as professed in my books on tango,
wiccans and other things, that it is a dimension unto itself. It is not simply a
strong emotion, but rather, it is a phenomenon that exists outside of the constraints
of time and space. It joins all things together and has an influence on the course
of events, be it a particle being repelled by another or the rejection of a lover by
his mate.

We are taught that Love is a strong feeling but it is much more than that: Love
exists where humans do not. It inhabits places and things as well as people. It is
in my computer and I am okay with that.

For more writings by the Kayak Hombre, check out his books available on Amazon and Kindle:

The Tango Touch

Touch. It is such an inconspicuous word for a sensation that has such an enormous impact on our emotions and on our lives. Touch is the feeling that remains with me long after the milonga has ended. So it was after some incredible dances with a delightful tanguera last Sunday. I was headed to the Baltimore area for work when I stopped to attend a practilonga in Media, PA, about two hours from my destination. I was on such a high when I left there that I could not listen to the radio for the rest of the ride. I drove the next hundred miles in silence, savoring the feeling of her in my embrace that was so clear it felt real.

Monday morning, I awoke in my hotel room to the thought of her in my arms. I could still remember quite vividly how she felt, my right hand on her shoulder blade, her back filling the nook of my elbow and bicep. Tuesday: same feeling but the memory is fading; I struggle to keep the impression of her in my mind fresh but it is fleeting. It is Wednesday morning and the recollection is almost gone. I am compelled to write or else the memory will be gone forever.

Touch is the sensation that keeps us coming back to tango like a drug addict to the needle. There is more to this sense than its mere definition suggests; it is an emotion that makes a memory; it is a digital readout of the person or object being touched; it is a sensation that records in our brains more than just texture and tone, it records possibilities.

Possibilities? Let me try to clarify that statement. If I pick up a million baseballs, one at a time, I probably will not remember touching any one of them. If I pick up a baseball my Dad gave to me, I will probably remember how the ball felt quite vividly as well as what I might do with it: throw it back to him, put it in my glove, toss it up in the air a few times, etc.

I did not remember how this particular tanguera smelled until I started writing about her: she smelled good, I remember the odor of her perfume made me think of a western forest and pinon pines, a desert aroma that is also sweet.

Her fragrance, however, was not the sensation that accompanied me on the rest of my drive, nor did it invade my thoughts in the early hours of the morning. It was the memory of the touch of her body that did this. There was a feeling of satisfaction when I touched her, maybe something more, I think she was happy. Whatever she was feeling I could sense that it was a good feeling through the contact of our bodies within the tango embrace.

This is my digital readout of her but what of the possibilities? Well, that should be obvious: we will dance again and the dancing will be good.


For more thoughts of the Kayak Hombre and Tango, check out his books available on Amazon and Kindle:

The Happy Ending

On my tango journeys out West I met a woman and fell in love. Love is a college filled with incredible avenues of learning unavailable in other courses of instruction. We shared many things but mostly we shared insights into our perceptions of tango. From our discussions I discovered a simple trick to make many of my tango engagements remembered favorably by my partners. The trick is to end the dance on a positive note and the way to do that is in the execution of the final release.

I had been dancing tango for five years when I met her and thought I knew everything but really I was just beginning to learn what is truly important to a tango encounter. Instructors of milonguero-style had swept through the western cities of Denver, Albuquerque and Tucson yet I had never heard of it. I was a New-York-City-style dancer, educated in all the fancy moves: lifts, volcadas, colgadas, etc. Tango to me at that time was more of an acrobatic feat than a true connection with my partner whom I barely understood, though, in my naivete, I assumed I knew all I needed to know.

My lover was a total beginner. I took it upon myself to educate her properly in the art and she blossomed like a flower, revealing to me a beauty of the dance I never knew existed. Because we were lovers, I was able to ask her questions about the men she danced with and felt certain I had gotten honest answers.

It takes three years to learn how to hold a woman in the tango embrace. It is not just an act of understanding the physical mechanics of where to place your arm and how to arrange your spine. It is the composition of many things, of mind, body and emotions. Holding a woman, a strange woman whom you’ve never met, has to be done from an attitude of respect, your mind must be clear of primal thoughts but those thoughts must not be hidden. Tango is full of paradoxes. You must project confidence and be calm. Above all, you must endeavor never to push her off her balance. If she is off-balance she will panic and that is no way to conduct a relationship, for that is what a tango dance is: a relationship if only for the length of the song or the group of songs that comprise a tanda.

We attended a tango festival in Tucson, then another in Albuquerque. In the spring of the year following the time when we first met we attended a close-embrace workshop in Salida, Colorado, taught by instructors well-versed in the milonguero-style of tango. This method of dancing focuses primarily on the emotional connection between a man and a woman and very little on movements beyond ocho cortado and caminar. Looking back, I probably gave the instructors less credit than they deserved because this workshop was the doorway to an invaluable insight for me into the tango connection. It was not so much what they were teaching that illuminated my experience, rather, it was what my partner was learning and what she was telling me about her experience that I found so valuable.

Here is what I learned from our late night and early morning conversations: if a close embrace connection is established then the disruption of that connection can be disconcerting to the woman. Every time your bodies disengage surface temperatures on the skin begin to drop and panic sets in for the woman; when contact is restored, calmness returns.

This was an epiphany for me and I was able to take this thought all the way to the conclusion of the dance encounter. If you are a follower of my blog you will know that I am a whitewater river guide at heart. A river runs through my life….literally. Of the many rivers I have worked on, the ones with great rides through the rapids at the end are the most loved by the rafting patrons. It is the final memory of the day and so it is with tango that the final memory of the dance should be the most pleasurable.

For the next four years after that workshop I worked on improving my performance of the release of the tango embrace after the dance. My lover and I had agreed that 2.5 seconds was the target duration of time that it would take to complete a proper disengagement of bodies though I have found, in practice, that it varies from woman to woman and from encounter to encounter: not all engagements are the same.

When the song has ended and everyone has stopped dancing, this is no time to disconnect abruptly. Doing so creates an unfavorable emotion and the entire experience may be counted as a failure. I have found that waiting for my partner to begin the release, either by her exhalation or a relaxation of her frame, eliminates the infusion of negative energy at the completion of the dance and, therefore, I believe, the registration of the dance in her memory as a positive experience.

Memories are a funny thing. We only remember things that we can associate with an emotion, be it positive or negative. The key, therefore, is to make that final moment of the dance a positive one by taking the time to allow her to disembark from your frame at her own leisure.

I began my tango education as a study of movement but I found this dance is about so much more than that. It is a dance about a woman and her experience of you, a man; an experience that is profound, unique and only available to those who venture to discover the universe that exists within another individual.

For more thoughts from the Kayak Hombre, check out his books available on Amazon and Kindle:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1976586577/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506046303&sr=1-1&keywords=the+tango+doctor

https://www.amazon.com/Fear-Intimacy-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1492357790/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414080444&sr=1-1&keywords=fear+of+intimacy+and+the+tango+cure

Remembering the Double-Xanax Tanguera

Once I danced tango with a woman who was tall, with short hair that revealed an incredibly slender and beautiful neck. She was nervous and told me so, something I would have done when I first began dancing tango: put words to the awkward truth of my situation so I could forge ahead with this invasion of my personal space. For me it was an exhortation of my partner’s allure, which was not meant as a come-on, only something I needed to say so I could maintain control of my faculties and attempt to lead with some amount of proficiency.

That was years ago but I often think about her and how hard it must have been for her to attend the tango workshop where we met. In doing so, I realize what an amazing transformation I have gone through myself.

When I first started dancing anything I was full of preconceived notions that homosexuals were everywhere and all women were laughing at me...and that my stupidity was obvious to all. That last part would be true until I learned to keep my mouth shut. In retrospect, I think we all would appear foolish if we didn’t apply a filter to our thoughts which I did not do at the time.

Here is an example of my idiocy. I burned my hands with a rope during a rock climbing accident and both my palms were nothing but giant blister burns. I put gauze and ointment on my wounds and covered my hands with winter gloves when I went to my dance lesson at the local high school that night. I thought it would be cool, kind of like something Michael Jackson would do only with a full set of gloves. Eventually, one of my partners who happened to be a doctor, convinced me to take off my gloves. It took her just a few moments to conclude that I needed to go to the hospital which was advice I did not heed because I am a stubborn man.

That’s who I am: a man who doesn’t go to hospitals. It’s a wonder I am still alive at fifty-seven. I don’t like to go to four star hotels either. The formality of these places is too terrifying a situation for me to endure. I didn’t go to the prom and would have skipped my graduation if it wasn’t necessary for me to get my diploma and escape high school forever.

I tell you this to let you know how hard it was for me attend my first public dances. I wouldn’t have endured the immense anxiety if I hadn’t been involuntarily celibate the three years before I began my education in dance. I was extremely paranoid of being laughed at, of being accused of being a homosexual, of becoming visibly aroused before an audience and of being exposed as a failure. In hindsight, I can see that I was overly self-conscious. All those things happened to me but they didn’t destroy me, in fact, they had quite the opposite effect: they made me stronger and more confident in myself. I had broken through!

I met her somewhere out West at a tango workshop.

“I’m so nervous,” she said, “I had to take two Xanax just to get myself to come here.”

I was flattered to have been the recipient of such an honest insight and responded in kind with a stupid revelation of my own, “Once I told my wife I was taking out the trash and came back drunk three hours later. I think she’d have been happy if I had gone to church and not gone to the bar.”

She responded by saying, “I would have been more mad if you had gone to church.”

Wow! This blew me away. It was then that I realized I had just made a new friend. We had something in common, we were both on journeys of self-exploration and were equally daunted by the task. I liked her, not in a sexual way although I cannot deny that I have entertained those thoughts; I liked her because of her courage which I knew from experience that was needed to throw herself into such a public confrontation with a member of the opposite sex.

My memories of her are my reward for having undertaken an adventure in tango. We had a platonic relationship that was not without moments of sensuality.

I started a practica in the small town where we both lived, an event held only a handful of times and attended by her, me and two others. I showed her how to do a proper molinete and we practiced it over and over in many different ways. I moved on but returned to the area a few times afterwards. Each time we danced was a delight in spite of the fact that she did not pursue tango instruction beyond that which was offered in the remote area where she lived. Our encounters were delightful because she focused on the perfect execution of the molinete which made me proud.

I have rarely taken it upon myself to teach a woman anything, she was one of the few exceptions and, even more rare, she was one of my few successes. Remembering this makes me happy because I know she could go anywhere and dance tango. She might not realize that but I do and I am glad. Once I taught a woman how to kayak in whitewater rivers. It was much harder but in the end she was able to go off on her own and paddle whitewater rivers throughout the world.

Knowledge of my success gives me satisfaction to this day.

On one of my returns to the area where my double-Xanax friend lived, we met at another tango workshop. I enjoyed many dances with her as we explored how to move in balance with each other. Afterwards, we had an early dinner at an Oriental restaurant and parted ways for the last time. She looked so beautiful sitting there across the table from me, her short hair, slender neck and brilliant smile making me feel like I was the luckiest man on Earth; I was absolutely enthralled yet I did not make a pass at her. It was such an enjoyable moment that the memory of it lingered on inside of me for weeks afterward. Eventually I had to put my thoughts into words and sent them to her. That made her feel awkward but I felt good about having done so.

It’s okay to tell someone how you feel about them even though that may make them feel uncomfortable. Dealing with our discomforts is one of the great lessons in life; not mistaking a sensual moment for an invitation to sex is another. Like Odysseus I have heard the sirens’ call and lived to tell about it. I find this incredibly rewarding. I don’t have fame or fortune but I have a wealth of memories that I can be proud of and that is something we should all strive for.