I stumbled into tango about four years ago. Like most great things in life, or so I've heard, it began more or less by accident. After graduating college and entering the working world, I found myself with obscene amounts of time on my hands in the evenings. (What do people do when they're not plowing through piles of literary criticism and frantically writing papers the night before they're due?) I'd always wanted to learn to dance--something, anything, it was all the same to me and my two left feet, my repressed Anglo-Catholic hips, my hopeless inability to memorize choreography, and my mild case of directional dyslexia. Still, I'd always wanted to learn to dance.
(I'd probably seen too many movies in which the class wallflower, supposedly unrecognizably beautiful now that she's taken off her glasses and gotten a decent dress, steps onto the dance floor and dazzles everyone at the prom; something like that. I still dream of that for myself, secretly. Well, not very secretly at all, now...)
So one evening, I decided to look up dance classes in my hometown, where I was once again living. There was a ballroom class, but it met on a night when I already had a firm commitment. Further down the list was a milonguero-style Argentine tango class (whatever
that meant).
"Tango," I mused, as visions flashed through my mind of sinuous women in fishnet stockings with roses in their hair, twining their legs around their partners--broad-shouldered toughs in pinstriped trousers and fedoras--each staring into the other's eyes with a smoldering look of mingled hatred and desire. "That sounds
sexy interesting... And maybe I'll meet some nice guys there."
Never mind that I don't have the type of body that can make that sort of movie-tango thing look good (there is nothing sinuous about me), or that I'd feel like a fool trying. The class would only be once a week for about a month, and it wasn't expensive. If I didn't like it, no big deal; I'd try something else later.
It turned out very different than I expected.
