INTRODUCING LA MARI VERSION 6.0

Work in progress…

The birthday cake

The method of celebration

The place

The wish of the day

The reality check

The symbol

IT AIN’T THERE NO MORE

We’ve been suffering from severe tango deprivation syndrome ever since the levees breached on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and much of the tango community we had worked so hard to support was washed away by the floods that destroyed much of invisible New Orleans.

To the bright eyes of the visitors that have gradually returned in record numbers things look a lot better than they were. For the long time residents and residents in exile, there is an awareness about things that ain’t there no more, as well as a keen appreciation for institutions that link the present to a nostalgic past.

Our TDS gets ameliorated ever so often when people come to do bed and tango with us. We have an incredible beautiful home with a guest area that sooth the senses, a private dance parlor, and a location that’s just a hop and a skip away from glam Magazine Street, legendary New Orleans culinary temple Commander’s Palace, and the streetcar named St. Charles.

Whether our visitors are our house guests or just in town wanting to tango, we look forward to Friday nights because it includes an early dance session at an Uptown restaurant hosted by the Argentine Tango Club of Greater New Orleans, a late fried chicken dinner at Fiorella’s in the French Quarter, and a stroll to The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny.

Overflowing crowds always waiting to get in

All sorts of funky roots music can be heard there on a nightly basis. At least two bands perform each night – the first starting around 6 p.m. and the second about 9:30 p.m. Music ranging from blues to trad jazz to Latin and various permutations make the Cat a current favorite hang for many on the Frenchmen Street scene. On Fridays, we listen and dance to the Jazz Vipers. The venue is one of the few remaining places where you can hear jazz that sounds the way it was intended to be heard, on acoustic instruments in a small venue with super dirty floors.

On a given evening a parade of musical guests would sit with the Vipers

Tonight, we had been looking forward to another fabulous Friday. First, newly married Tim and April from Maryland completed their week long sessions of private lessons and had their first real live tango dancing experience at Nirvana. Next, we joined Maria and Russell, fresh from their successful participation on the Tales of the Cocktail Conference and Exhibits, at Fiorella’s for fried chicken, fries and mashed potatoes. Finally we made our way to the Spotted Cat and almost had what it amounts to a serious case of the sadness. The side walk was deserted, and the music, well, it sounded Bourbon Street, amps and electronics included. As we stood there, we realized that The Spotted Cat ain’t there no more.

The sign at the door read Jimbeaux’s which is Jimbo’s in pig French, and the floors had been painted. The band stand was on the opposite side of the entrance and the bar was out of Abita Amber. It appears that as of April 30th the lease ran out and the landlord, Jimbeaux, decided to have a go at running the bar himself just in time for Jazzfest. The place got shut down during Jazzfest for numerous infractions about a day or two after it opened.

We first were introduced to the Spotted Cat by our friend Sabina whose sax playing husband Joe sat in many times with the Jazz Vipers. Gradually we became to appreciate the place as one of the most reliable live music joints on Frenchmen Street. We had to hang around for a while to grab one of those few seats by the window, while inching in for some space among the crowd of enthusiastic fabulous jitter-buggers.

The last time we were at the Spotted Cat was in March when Aaron and Rose visited from San Antonio. That night something especial happened to us. Half way through their set, the Jazz Vipers charged with their rendition of William Christopher Handy’s Saint Louis Blues. Before we realized it, we were on the small dance floor putting on one of the most inspired tango performances ever seeing at the Spotted Cat.

The memory of that unexpected last time at the Spotted Cat lingers on as the notes of Saint Louis Blues fill in the emptiness of a New Orleans institution that ain’t there no more.

The Jazz Vipers – St. Louis Blues

PINA BAUSCH, R.I.P

Although many people I know would strongly disagree, I don’t necessarily think myself as a dancer. I wake up every morning thinking like the electrical engineer my mother was proud of, the one I was until the day I became, ahem, a dancer. A special breed of dancer though, a “bailarin de tango.” Thus, I dance tango because I know how, and I love doing it with a woman in my arms. At the modern dance, contact improvisation and other individual forms of corporal expression arenas, I never had any particular desire to be more than a casual spectator.

1940 - 2009

At first, the news that choreographer and German dancer Pina Bausch had just died didn’t register, but the unusual buzzing in the Internet news services, the emails from dance organizations, and an article in Clarin.com caught my attention.

Pina Bausch had become one of the largest and influential artists of the 20th century when she felt victim to a fulminating cancer on June 30 at the age of 68 leaving innumerable projects in progress; just the Sunday before she had appeared on stage to take a bow along with her company on the stage of the Wuppertal theater where she premiered all her creations.

She was a young choreographer with an impressive body of works when in 1973, the general director of the Municipal Theater of Wuppertal , a small German city, asked her to take charge of the dance company of the prestigious institution. She was given complete freedom by the general director which allowed her to develop new vocabularies in an entirely personal way. The results of her difficult explorations were initially rejected by the local public and a good part of the members of the dance company.

When the Wuppertaler Tanztheater arrived for the first time to Buenos Aires in 1980, the audiences in Wuppertal were deeply divided regarding the dance company. On the one hand, there was a compact group of admirers; on the other, a front of convinced critics: the most violent spat and showered Pina Bausch with insults, and the most extreme woke her up in the middle of the night with telephone calls asking her to leave the city. But something new was being created, the Tanztheater (”dance theater”), the union of genuine dance and theatrical methods of stage performance; a new, unique dance form (especially in Germany), which, in contrast to classical ballet, distinguished itself through an intended reference to reality.

In the years that followed, to this day, countless artists of the dance and of the theater everywhere have been influenced by the scenic thoughts of Pina Bausch, a performance form that combines dance, speaking, singing and chanting, conventional theater and the use of props, set, and costumes in one amalgam.

Left, a scene from Pina Bausch’s Bandoneon. Right, Guillermo and Fernanda’s use of Pina’s idea

In 1995, Pina returned to Argentina to present her work Bandoneón at Theater San Martin . The response from the audience was overwhelmingly positive. This most beautiful creation cast a smart view on the tango without resorting to a single tango step. At that time, for reasons that are not clear, Pina took some tango lessons with Tete, a hardened resident of the milongas and distinguished enthusiastic dancer. She then invited him to Germany to give lessons to her company.

More puzzling yet is that for unknown reasons neither she nor the Wuppertaler Tanztheater ever returned to Buenos Aires, while regularly traveling to Brazil and in recent years, to Chile. Not being necessarily an expert in these matters, my thoughts this week focus on the loss of two great icnos of the dance, Pina Bausch and Michael Jackson.

LA MILONGA DE PAPA

Sometimes the simplest of problems lead to some wonderful solutions.

Doug and Catherine are good friends from the early days. Doug has been one of the contacts that facilitated our visits to Ithaca, NY over the years. He has then joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and spends a lot of his time at sea. Catherine is a university professor and she was coming to New Orleans to present a documentary she produced. Doug decided to come and join her.

When Doug wrote about their visit we were very happy to see that the weekend they would be in town coincided with the monthly dance at Lucy’s, so we made plans to go together and dance. The Wednesday before that, we found out that Lucy’s had been moved one week ahead because June 21 was Father’s Day.

At the Thursday class at La Thai, we were surprised to see Steven from Santa Cruz, CA via New Orleans, LA. He too was in town and looking forward to Lucy’s milonga. Just before we left we asked the owners if the tango room would be available Sunday, and to our surprise they said yes. So the Who’s Your Daddy milonga was born. The challenge now was to spread the word and hope for the best.

We couldn’t have been more pleased as the dancers of our community showed up in force and the party was a great success.

I don’t remember ever receiving an ecard within hours of the completion of a tango dance party, or a bottle of fine wine or a book with a Happy Father’s Day wish.

Actually I don’t remember how I got home Sunday night. I do remember Abita beer and FiorelIa’s fried chicken, crashing Clive’s gig at the Palm Court, and most important, I do remember the capacity crowd that filled the tango room at La Thai.

We are very grateful to each one of the participants for giving us the opportunity to show our friends Steven, Doug and Catherine a bit of what a healthy and nurturing tango community could be when people allow their good side to guide their actions.

With two days notice, it was an unexpected pleasure to see so many people engaged in the ritual of dancing and nothing else.

SOWING GOOD INTENTIONS AND HARVESTING KINDNESS

As Father’s Day approaches, we don’t expect getting greetings cards from Walter, Joe, Ann, George, Nicole, David, Mario and a few other long forgotten tangosons and daughters whose names have faded down memory lane. These are people we gave birth to as tango dancers, teachers, promoters along with helping them build their fledgling communities since 1996. Today, from Anchorage to the Hudson Valley, across the Pacific Ocean to Honolulu, and across the country through Champaign-Urbana, Sarasota, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee,  our tangosons and daughters are the trunks who have grown from the tango seeds we’ve been sowing since the days when the passion for tango really meant that. Until recent, we even had a special mention at the bottom of one those communities websites, where forever gratitude and appreciation for having started it all was wholeheartedly expressed with the exuberance of those who still have not lost their bearings. It is a fact of life that kids who never grow up renege of the experiences of the early years, denying the existence of those parental figures who took them by the hand and taught them how to walk without tripping, and how to skip around the potholes of tango life. They continue to be children in oversize bodies being bound by the shame that blinds them.

As the years went by we slowed down the itinerant nature of our lives, settled in the South, downsizing and investing time and money in a local community, only to see it wiped out by Katrina. Boo hoo, boo hoo… Well there are things that needed to be said while being alive, because we are seeing an alarming increase in the death announcements of people we know. Paraphrasing Ana Maria Rabatte’s poem IN LIFE, BROTHER, IN LIFE,  let’s not wait for people to die to talk about our affection. Let’s do it while they’re still alive brothers and sisters. If you want to give a flower don’t wait until someone dies, send it today with love, while they’re still alive.

Anyway, when we were looking forward to sitting on the porch, sipping Malbecs, and watching the jazz funerals pass by on their way to the Lafayette cemetery nearby, we got the call to go out and help bring to life a new tango community. Right in the Emerald Coast, the Hamptons of the New Orleans well to do, the Floridians Redneck Riviera. Let me tell you, if feels good to be taking new steps all over again along with our newest tangosons and daughters… The planting of good intentions yields a harvest of kindness.

A memorable weekend along the Emerald Coast

TONITE I’M GETTING DRUNK

I saw him as soon as I walked into the hall; he looked lonesome and lost like Lestat in a new moon’s fog. As he wandered around the soft lit room, he looked like a featherless bantam courting a yawning chicken. The sight brought back unpleasant memories that almost made me want to walk away.

Seven years have past since he asked to join the group we were coaching for a formation dance. His cocky attitude and an open despise for women in position of authority made him an instant nuisance, and his verbal abuse and the humiliating ways in which he treated his partner were a source of major embarrassment for everyone involved. For months, nobody ever saw him finish a 3 minute dance without stopping to admonish, lecture or blame his partner for his own ineptitude on the dance floor.

Then one day of May six years ago he physically forced a visiting dancer to go out for beignets instead of attending an after hours party that was being given in her honor. Unable to cope with the embarrassment of his rude behavior, he decided to secede from the community, announcing that his fledgling group of five would never be associated with “Alberto Paz,” and publicly declaring that his mission would be “to put us out of business.”

Sadly, quite a few felt very uncomfortable with the venom he was spewing to locals and visitors alike, but choose the path of less resistance, assuming that we were to blame for his psychopath actions, and excluding us from group activities. The double sword that turns tolerance into hypocrisy fell upon us one last time, when we found out after four months in exile after Katrina that former friends and students were openly disappointed that we had managed to return.

There is something cruel about the way sometimes people find closure. There he was tonight without his long time partner, shoving and shuffling around someone unknown, looking lifeless, tasteless and still clueless as to what tango dancing is all about.

The encounter made me feel so bad because I felt so good. The more I thought about it, the more I felt I was going to get sick, so tonight I’m getting drunk to forget and finally forgive.

THE KELY WE KNEW

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Kely Posadas turned 69 on December 24, 2008. She passed away after losing her battle with lung cancer on April 27, 2009. The news made its way slowly through various Internet groups, and as it seems characteristic of the narcissist tendencies of many people involved in the business of tango, the two things that were most mentioned in context with the news of Kely’s passing were “I shared the stage with Kely,” and Kely’s “one show dress being her modest and limited wardrobe,” preceded by a ‘no disrespect meant’ by the disrespectful offender. Banality, vanity and selfishness could very well be a cover for the inability for some humans to behave in a human way.

The Kely we knew was born Clara Raquel Lamdam in 1939, just as the Golden years of the tango got underway. Just before the Thanksgiving holidays in 1952, Bill Haley’s band had changed their name and their image for the last time. Off had come the cowboy boots and the white Stetsons. With some regrets and more than a little apprehension, the four young musicians, had turned their backs on their beloved country/ western music and had bravely faced an unknown future as “Bill Haley and his Comets”. Shortly after, Kely became a teenager as the wave of rock and roll captured the imagination of sons and daughters of the upper, middle, and lower class families. With Bill Haley and his Comets came Little Richard and Elvis Presley leading the way with their rambunctious music into a craze that lasted way into the mid sixties.

It was around 1958 that she met Facundo Posadas and they both became an item taking the dance floors by storm with their unique brand of rocanrol. Eventually they parted ways and for almost thirty years they lived different lives until they run into each at the after hours dance at Michelangelo. They both have been married and they were now divorced hanging out at the dance halls with other aging rock and rollers who were discovering the fascination with the tango by foreigners. As the renewed enthusiasm for the tango grew, Facundo and Kely became part of the flora and fauna of the traditional milongas in Buenos Aires, being known as the “roqueros.”

Jorge Firpo, Facundo Posadas, Alberto Paz, Kely Posadas and Valorie Hart at Club Akarense

We met them during our first trip to Buenos Aires on April, 1997. Our popular and prestigious magazine El Firulete was a door opening calling card. We received an invitation to their upscale apartment in Barrio Norte, as guests of one of their classes for white collar professionals. We were surprised when a few days later they joined Mingo and Esther Pugliese, Pupi Castello and Graciela Gonzalez at La Galeria del Tango for a special series of exhibitions at a surprise birthday party for Alberto given by Graciela.

During a memorable month in Buenos Aires, we had the opportunity to see Kely enjoying life on the dance floor, first at Club Akarense, a legendary milonga in Villa Urquiza run by Rodolfo and Maria Cieri, then at another legendary Tuesday hang out, Club Almagro, and finally, on the night they announced their engagement to be married at Club Sunderland.

Los Angeles, CA

In the dead heat of the 1997 Southern California summer, we had been planning a major event for a Japanese dancing company, Tango Libertad. Actually it was a birthday party with a tango theme for one of the leading dancers of the troupe. She invited her teacher and his partner to head a show that would include us as well. Just about that time we received a message from Facundo informing us of their pending arrival in Los Angeles, on their way to a fabulous tour of the USA managed by an undisclosed personality of the tango. Considering it a natural gesture of professional courtesy we squeezed the budget for the party and invited Facundo and Kely to be part of the show for Tango Libertad. Watch their first ever USA performance HERE.

While waiting for the mysterious tango personality to materialize, we took Facundo and Kely under our wings and spent an extra week in Los Angeles. Here is Facundo first experience with an American steak and french fries.

A visit to the Universal Studios in Hollywood, CA is something that a foreign visitor can appreciate, especially when they have seen many of the products coming out of this studio on local television. Here is Kely posing for posterity under the famous sign.

Kely in a a couple of poses in and around Universal Studios. Twelve years before Michelle Obama, Kely was already making a fashion statement claiming her right to bare arms on a summer day.

The Hollywood hills are a magnificent place to spot the smog covered city of the Angels from a vantage point. The Apollo 13 capsule was a hit with Facundo and Kely, and here is proof they were there and then.

A candid camera moment capturing Kely's stroll through the Universal Studio food court.

A life size bronze statue of Charlie Chaplin at the historic Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, steps away across the street from the Chinese Theater. The temptation to join Chaplin for a rest was too hard to resist.

On the left, they stand outside the Roosevelt Hotel with the Hollywood Boulevard street sign in the background. On the right, in the lobby of the hotel in front of a giant poster of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

At the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, Kely leaving her hand prints

The sense of friendship and camaraderie is something a photo can only begin to suggest.

One last pose at the magnificent and imposing gallery of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

A surprise encounter with Michael Walker and Luren Bellucci at a Los Angeless milonga

A week had gone by and still no news from the mysterious tango personality Facundo still refused to identify, so we had one final look at the Los Angeles skyline before we headed home to Sunnyvale in the Bay Area, with our newly adopted guests in tow.

Northern California

Back in the neighborhood we were very happy to open our home to the unexpected guests, and decided to contribute to their cause by showing them around at the various milongas, organizing a series of workshops (that’s when the term “milonga candombera” was first coined to add an exotic touch at the promotional blur) , and finally turning over to them our monthly milonga at the Dance Spetrum Studio in Campbell, CA. At the same time we took them around to show them the beautiful sights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, CA

Kely at the steering wheel

Sweeping the leaves from the porch

Out for a stroll

Grocery shopping

In the kitchen

In the living room

A whole month went by. Facundo was becoming very uptight about the lack of news from his mystery tango personality, although the writing in the wall was so obvious that we had already figured that he was talking about Carlos Gavito. For reasons only they knew, Gavito was nowhere to be found, and he didn’t seem aware that the promises he might have made on a night of excesses in Buenos Aires, had been taking seriously by these two 57 year old kids.

In the meantime our first Labor Day weekend tango getaway in Reno, Nevada was in full swing of preparation. We had gotten the commitment of Daniela Arcuri and Armando Orzuza to join us, and we now were trying to figure out what to do with Facundo and Kely, still without a plan of action and hanging around the house.

Reno, NV

Finally, we decided to forgo our own share of the proceeds (making money for everybody else, including hotels, airlines and self appointed tango legends seemed to have been our motus operandi at a time when we were driven by the purity and innocence of what the Argentine tango and its ambassadors symbolized) and add them to the roster, making the festival a three couple event. Little did we know about some past feud between Facundo and Daniela and a taxi ride in Europe, but at the Johnny Rocket’s hamburger join inside the majestic Reno Hilton, Facundo lwent ballisitc at the suggestion that we were going to get together with the other couple to plan a course of action for the following three days of the festival. That was perhaps the first time that he was reminded who was the boss and who was the paid help. This is worth mentioning because in over a month and a half of  living together, Kely had been a grand lady and the big momma catering to every whim of a spoiled overgrown  “teenager,” from the choice of food to the collection of souvenirs and mementos.

Reno, NV is indeed a little city with a feeling of grandeur. It is definitely a gambling city but nothing to do with the hype and hustle of Las Vegas. We had been lucky that the Reno Hilton seemed to be idle during the Labor Day weekend, and we got to use their facilities at a very reasonable cost. Not only that, but its location just a skip and a hop away from the airport and far removed from the strip, gives it a unique resort like quality. The charm of the city soon calmed the egos, and we actually proceeded to have a good time.

On the left, Daniela Arcuri, Valorie Hart and Kely Posadas taking stroll on the main strip of Reno. On the right, Facundo and Kely look proud and pleased to see their first promotional festival poster in the USA

Somehow treating these people with class and quality, like using a limousine to and from the airport plus to drive around the city seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Perhaps it was that understanding that the more one gives the more likely one is to receive as time goes by. Armando Orzuza, Daniela Arcuri ,Valorie Hart and Kely in the luxury comfort of a stretched limo. We do know how to treat tango people with class, don't we?

In the lobby of a Reno casino waiting to go see the musical show Smokey Joe's Cafe

An impromptu chorus line on the lobby of a casino denotes happy times and a certainty that nobody can take away what we danced.

At the theater, waiting to see a great musical show, the last photo of Kely with Valorie

Shortly after we returned to Sunnyvale, we realized that we would have to intervene and do something to help these people get on with their journey. We called on our newly created network of good friends, the ones we had set up and put on business organizing workshops for Carlos Gavito during the first triumphal tour of Forever Tango in 1996. By the way Gavito was still AWOL.

In a matter of days, we put together a tour for Facundo and Kely that would take them to Chicago, New York and Montreal. Bob Dronksi in Chicago volunteered to buy their airline tickets and Danel in NYC agreed to host them, house them and eventually send them to Montreal.  Then it was time to leave. Things didn’t go very well, we kept hearing, so we flew to New York to offer support and rescue them from a far away place where they have been housed. We called upon another friend and this time Facundo and Kely stayed in Manhattan for the rest of the week.

This would be the last time we would look back at this month and a half experience as the beginning of a great relationship. By the time they arrived in Montreal, Facundo blew a gasket because he confused paying back Dronski for his generosity in buying their tickets with his own money, with an intention on our part to shortchanging him of the money he felt entitled to regardless of what it cost to put him on the road to stardom. In a matter of days, we had gone form being these great hosts with the open ended generosity to a couple of crooks stealing Facundo’s God given right to pocket everything in sight regardless.  “It’s the obligation of the promoter to provide housing, meals and travel,” he would write a year later, when reminded of what we had done to take care of them while stranded, and all we did to launch their career in the USA at age 57.

Years passed as we witnessed from the sidelines the rise in popularity of Facundo and Kely, as we read the accolades from newly acquired hosts and promoters, and as we heard about the growing tales about their accomplishments. Then, on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, after spending four months on the road, we set anchors in Buenos Aires. It was on a Sunday evening in the month of December, 2005 that Kely walked across the crowded floor of the Circulo Trovador in Vicente Lopez to  greet us, to welcome us and to tell us how concerned she had been about our well being when the news of the flooding of New Orleans reached her in Buenos Aires. It was like time had never passed.

We didn't realize at the time that this would be the final good bye to Kely, the friend, and we now sadly say it again this time with our prayers for the eternal rest of her soul.

We saw her one more time at Niño Bien and then, months later we learned about her illness. She stopped traveling on advice from her doctor after her last US appearance sometime in 2007. News from her and the condition of her health were less and less forthcoming until the dreadful subject line of a message on April 28, read, Kely passes away in Buenos Aires.

Suddenly the realization of that ray of hope that one day we would resume the wonderful friendship we cultivated in the summer of 1997, took an irreversible turn for the worst as the reality that this time she had left forever set on.

Rest in peace Kely.

THE OTHER SHOE DROPETH

I respect you in the morning and the check is in the mail have been forever two of the most quoted lies when it comes to highlight empty promises that people often make but have no intention to follow through.

Although it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone within spitting distance in this town, many of you readers from the blogosphere may appreciate getting a background about the lukewarm support of tango at Le Phare, how the romance came to a sudden end, the sadness began and a few things more.

The nice manager of the former Loft 523 seemed very eager to resurrect “the tango night.” He had heard so many tales about the pre Katrina tango night at the Loft, he had said when  we happened to walk by the place and see it open again after two years in the aftermath of Katrina. During that time we had been nurturing the emotional wounds caused by the bitterness and bile of a few former dancer/student/friends who for some evil reasons were “unhappy that we had returned to New Orleans.”

There was a  caveat though, and that was that the available day was Wednesday. Not good because there already was a very well attended dance in Baton Rouge which we liked to attend every now and then on Wednesdays. For the rest some do swing and others suck on sour grapes. But there was a core of dedicated dancers from the past, a number of friends who promised to respect us in the morning, and a handful of new bodies so we went ahead and got back into providing an opportunity for good tango dancing on September 17, 2008.

We managed to survive through the holiday season which this town takes very serious, focusing on family and friends, and even took in an unusual amount of thunderstorms and even a snow fall. The word lukewarm kept defining the support the community at large gave to arguably the best floor, the best ambiance, and the best music available to indulge in the intimacy and exhilaration of the tango. Yet, Mr. Nice Manager kept assuring us that all was good, that he enjoyed the small group, and that the rumors that a hip hop DJ wanted to move in on us were unfounded. Then came the last minute email, “it’s not you, it’s me.” The other shoe dropeth. The party line is that the finance people (nobody’s ever seen them, but they do exist, don’t they?) were not happy with the meager $150 tango dancers were dropping at the bar every Wednesday.

I have another theory. Two weeks ago as I approached the bar counter I was shocked hearing a most offensive racist statement regarding Mr. Nice Manager who was even closer to the wingnut than I was. Somehow the racial rant was about, and I paraphrase, how Mr. Nice Boy Manager got to have an education, a job and a good life because of the money that the federal government took away from the Mayflower families coffers midway through the twentieth century.

The “it’s not you, it’s me” email continued, “I regret to inform you that after my meeting today, the managing partners for Le Phare have decided that Tango Night isn’t what we’re looking for on a Wed. Night.”

I think that Mr. I Carry a Card That Proves That My Ancestors Arrived In The Mayflower got Mr. Nice Manager pissed. Thump, kaboon, and the tango got kicked out of Le Phare.

GIROS INTERRUPTUS

March came as a lamb and went as a lion. We had major storms towards the end of the month, and once again we saw the river pass by our front porch. This time the downpour lasted much longer than usual and the pumps that suck up the water and spit it into the lake couldn’t keep up. It was too late to get the car off the street, so we spent a good hour with our fingers crossed, hoping that the old bimmer would not sail away down to Magazine street. Fortunately the water never went over the tires but later we found out that it had managed to sip in from under the chassis and the interior carpets were drenched. Holy mold Batman!

Oh well, I meant to tell you about the excitement of going the next day, March 31, to a local university to teach a pro bono tango lesson to a group of young students as part of the cultural outreach program the university has. One of our newest tango dancers, fresh from Buenos Aires made the arrangement as part of her job as a Spanish Language Assistant.

Sorting out streets that were still wet from the night before storm, we set up our boom box in a recreation hall with a hard carpeting floor. A couple of dozen young men and women spent the next hour and half enjoying and having fun with the intricacies of arrepentidas and giros interruptus. As always we lit the flame, now let’s hope they find a place to practice and dance.

OMG, WTF, AND THEY CALL THAT ARGENTAIN?

Stop the presses and alert the media.

Big hoopla around the tango communities!

Dancing with the Stars will include the Argentain tangou!

It would be nice to have the United States go crazy over ARGENTINE TANGO, some loony writes. Unfortunately many people have not experienced it. And we all know that “TO KNOW THE ARGENTINE TANGO IS TO LOVE IT”. Bless her clueless heart.

So Li’l Kim and Derek just went first and they did the tangou to a cheesy TAQUITO MILITAR, a milonga beat.
Bruno must be smoking the real shit, because he gave them a 10.
America is loving it already.

LT is having a hard time concentrating but… Edyta pobrecita. The music sucks very badly so actually they don’t look too bad. Almost “nuevo light.”  Yes, a little chemistry was lacking, but how can you focus your testosterone when the woman is flying and flicking her feet all over the place. Lawrence got punished with a 5 from Len for being grounded. Go figure it. Oh, elephants can’t dance tango like a panther. Got it. Are you still loving it America?

Fans seem to love Steve the Woz, who seems to be overcoming his fear of acting gay. Karina brings a chair and after they do an interlude a la me Guillerma, you Fernando, they actually go into a brief Pupi apilado walk without the tongue in Karina’s ear. He didn’t drop her but he still gets trashed by all three judges. Bruno gets the best quote for tango that stinks, “We all know that the tango comes from the ghettos of Buenos Aires, but the only thing you got from there is the stench.” Ah yes, the music is getting even hideous now but who’s listening.

Holly and Dimitri. Very sophisticated dance, he says. She’s hurt and cries in the bathroom. What’s with the chair? He goes around holding her foot! She exhibits chicken legs. Stupid arrangement of Libertango with a choreography that looks it was learned from watching You Tube. At the end he picks her up and does a Larici with poor Holly throwing her backwards into the floor. If they had that big bandoneon, she would have hit it with her ass. So far pretty lame so we suspect that Cheryl and partner after four hours with Sandor in L.A. would clean everybody’s clock. But you never know so while we go for another glass of wine, we wait. And ah, yes. How do you love it so far America?

Everybody knows Frenchmen can’t dance tango. Just kidding, actually I’m using the typical “everybody knows bullshit, bullshit” preface to lame postings by loony tunes people. So Gilles and Cheryl look fab. Never mind his faggy back ochos or his stiff pointed elbows. Who cares about dancing. They are good actors playing a clean, tight routine. The Sandor touch shows, they learned the few tricks and they look amazing. All in four hours. To top it off, the clincher of all the sleazy endings, the roasted chicken. That gets Bruno so aroused that his butt might be melting like butter on a hot pan, and proclaims Gilles the quintessential Latin Lover. Carrie Ann makes sense when she says that nobody could tell who was the professional. That goes to show you America that a good time tested choreography properly performed can go a long way to the point where you can’t remember what music they were dancing to. I bet it was as bad or worse than the previous one. But fear not, next time you go out and try the roasted chicken never mind what music they’re playing, except if the lyrics start with “Oh, Jose can you see?” They got a deserved perfect score and your vote America. Me, I go with my own sets of values and vote for Li’l Kim and Derek who chose a piece of music, wrong rhythm and all, that actually sounded Argentain.