Tingo tango tailgor spy - A Very Presidential Valentine's Shrove Tuesday Tango Experience

Last night I hosted that monthly Experience Tango event that I tend to "host" in varying forms of hostability depending on the month. This month, I did teach the lesson and schmooze the guests. I did not dj. And, as always, I did not provide my own hand-catered perfection of confections and snacks as far as the eye could see that the far-more-than-nominal host perpetually provides. My main job is generally to be movable artwork adorning our hallowed halls of tango (and whatever else usually happens there). I did this much with a decent amount of aplomb, I am happy to report, despite some initial reluctance to believe I could approach the evening with anything but a drowsy snarl. I think the socks (nominally over the knee socks and I have a sticker to prove it - it spent most of the evening actually on my knee because it entertained me to have a tautologous sticker/inspidid inside joke with myself) helped boost my spirits. The general placidity of what can often be a cacophonous chaos of an evening helped as well.

Our pre-dance class was quite small and we sadly seemed to scare off the two complete newbies halfway through. I blame myself, as I took efforts to actually remember their names (I'm working on this, because in the dance world you circulate so often that the brain starts to pre-program to let introductions slip off the memory like water from vinyl). Still, other than crushing the spirits of would-be-tangueros,  we stuck to a productive orientation class script, and I got to offer such Adella-classics as "Imagine you are pulling on a hook on the top of your head" and "make orange juice with your thighs!" that hopefully make a little sense in contexts but at the very least provide a contrast to the epicene platitudes about spirit and connection that perhaps insert themselves into the inadvertent idyl on TANGO that may arise in lieu of simple explanations. 

The music hit a number of snags, skipping betwixt snippets of songs like a stone on the water. I suspect that our dj - who most often burns cds before beginning - was not quite prepared for live dj-ing, but ran out of time getting there. It was still a pleasant conglomeration of music, and actually made me feel better about my December media monkey meltdown dj experience since the following two djs have also had far more buggy issues with their sets. It was a little perplexing to begin a tango, segue abruptly into a vals, whiplash into a tango and then end up doing milonga, but I'm game for almost anything even if I prefer to exert a little more control over my partner selections for each style. 

And I did get yet another great milonga set, which is often unheard of (sparingly danced with familiarity or nuance here). This time is was my old Seattle teaching/practice partner - Jon of the long blond hair, Go Tournaments, and present stay-at-home-daddom. He and his SO wrangled some grandparents into babysitting and managed to make it out. And we stumbled straight into a milonga set as the tide broke and both were unaccompanied by partners. He is a mad milonga devil - not always the easiest to follow when he gets into full dervish revelry, but always gleeful and fully committed. A good milonga (as the precursor dance to tango, and not as the tango dance event) shows more of its African roots, hunkers down into the group and earth more, has a fiendish ebullience, and rat-tat-tats the percussive nature of the music like nothing else. And this was a good milonga. 

The fella - pictured above in shoe form - came along as well and made brave scouting strides towards charming and treating the other follows when my time to host (e.g. actually dance with attendees) arose. He took a Milonguero 101 series from the 8th Style recently and it has had a palpable impact on his dancing. It's much lighter and more controlled now and I sincerely hope (by all reports such hope is realized) that it's making these events more entertaining for him. Not that the lavish banquet in the snack room isn't enough to entertain any one with a capacious appetite such as his, but well... I did also take him to Chocolate Necessities for some coffee and gelato before hand, so such entertainment may have been redundant. They incidentally sell gigantic bulk slabs of Caillebut chocolate, which I am trying to convince Mr. (W)right would be the far preferable alternative to a traditional wedding cake. It's thick, so I'm thinking that instead of cutting the cake, the bride and groom would have to mallet the cocoa stele. I also would like to have their chocolate shoe and maybe a chocolate bike as a sub-in for the little bride and groom figurines: 

Wedding planning and chocolate aside, I must assume that it was a rousingly successful evening on my part, since we managed to stay until the nominal end (I usually sneak out early when I'm not dj-ing due to having the sleep cycle of a ninety year old). I may not have been navigating my way past things like walls quite so effectively by the time we made it home and of course I still woke with the dawn because I can do nothing else. 

It will be an interesting recovery day before I move from groggy staggers into blubbery tears and percussive plaudits at Lucia di Lammormore this afternoon. By god, there will be coffee.