Like many a foreigner, I was first seduced by the Argentine Tango while sitting at a café in the colorful working class barrio of La Boca in Buenos Aires. It was here, at a non-descript café on the Calle Caminito, while sipping a glass of Malbec that was as vibrant as La Boca itself that my introduction to the tango began. As I turned to see if I could locate where the mellifluous mélange of live Afro-Cuban and Spanish music was emanating from I spotted a pair of street performers dancing the most sensual dance I had ever seen.

The couple’s movements mesmerized me and for the next few minutes these anonymous dancers were the only two beings that existed for me. I was captivated by the graceful style exhibited by the female dancer. She gave the illusion of floating when she danced as she glided across the floor. Her feet rarely touched the ground when she would perform such moves as the “gancho,” a move in which she would hook her leg around her partner’s leg or a “boleo” where she would perform small quick back kicks as she sashayed from side to side. Her moves were often quick, yet elegant and poised. At other times, she would dance slowly and tantalizingly by performing such moves as sliding her foot down her partner’s body or arching her back as he dipped her.

Watching this couple, it was not hard to imagine a time when the tango was a forbidden dance. Although there is nothing vulgar about it, the Argentine Tango is danced in a close embrace or “abrazo.” It is for this reason when there is chemistry between partners, such as the couple I was watching, that I feel as though I am watching an immensely private moment between two lovers. The couple’s dance conveyed several emotions over the course of a few minutes allowing a voyeuristic glimpse into their relationship. Through their dance steps viewers could catch conflicting moments of flirtation, foreplay, seduction, resistance, passion, rejection and reconciliation. The emotions that we all have in human relationships were summed up in one simple, yet emotionally intricate and complicated dance.

It is said that tango is essentially walking with a partner to music, but such a description misses the essence of tango. To me, the tango is a dance where a couple makes love while fully clothed. It is the most passionate dance I have ever seen performed and it is a dance I knew then I had to learn. It is for this reason that I enrolled in Group Dance classes at “Dance with Me Soho.” I was hoping that I could relive my time in Buenos Aires and learn to dance like the porteña I saw dance so beautifully. Secretly, I was also hoping I would be paired up with an Antonio Banderas type, preferably the Antonio Banderas from “Take the Lead” since that version already knew how to dance the tango, but any iteration of Antonio would do.

When I arrived at the dance studio, I realized that not only would Antonio would not be in attendance, but I would be lucky to dance with a man at all. The ratio of men to women was disappointing as there were eleven women to three men in the class. I tried to overcome this chromosomal imbalance through imagination. When the instructor turned the music on, I transported myself back to Buenos Aires by imagining I was six thousand miles away at a milonga in Palermo Soho, a fashionable neighborhood of Buenos Aires. I imagined Carlos Gardel was signing one of his legendary tango songs, Por Una Cabeza, a song in which he compares his love for gambling on the ponies to his obsession for a particular lady. I pretended that I was the graceful, sensual porteña on Calle Caminito instead of the frustrated woman on Broome Street dancing with an equally frustrated woman where one of us would inevitably stop every so often to ask, “who is leading? Are you leading? Are you pretending to be the boy? Am I the boy? Who is the boy?” The gender confusion was exhausting! After awhile I felt like I was on a bad reality TV show that was experimenting with gender identity.

That night I would learn that at a milonga, a tango dance hall, couples dance counter-clockwise. This was a concept my classmates and I seemed to have had problems grasping as there were several collisions. As someone who would have rallied against banning the tango in its heyday, I would fully support the City of New York outlawing my class ever dancing the tango en masse. What we, as a collective, did to such a graceful dance, should be illegal. While there is a thriving milonga scene in New York City, which I hope to visit one day, I will only do so after I have engaged a private dance instructor to learn the tango. Although I have three more classes left, I have banned myself from taking group tango lessons. For the next three weeks, this gringa can be found dancing salsa in Soho.

There are days when I wake up loving this city just a little more than I usually do.  It’s like when I wake up feeling like it’s Valentine’s Day and New York is my Valentine who just gave me a giant princess cut diamond engagement ring (btw feel free to tell my future finance that’s the kind of ring I want).  My mood rarely changes on these days, even when I have momentary lapses of rage like when I’m at work and there’s a 30-90 minute period of time where I could rip my hair out (or better yet someone else’s) because someone is moving too slowly or is being incompetent or is just generally grating on my frazzled New York nerves!  Today was one of those insanely lovely New York days where even though I hadn’t slept more than 4 hours in two days due to the not so pleasant sound of garbage trucks repeatedly visiting the business across the street from me at all hours of the night making it impossible to sleep (seriously Bloomberg where’s your noise violation citations now?). Side note, when I first moved into my apartment I had apartment rage after about 3 sleepless nights of hearing the garbage trucks.  On the third night I reached my breaking point and threw open my window at 3 a.m. and yelled like some psychopath “MUST YOU BLOODY DO THIS NOW?  EVERY FREAKING NIGHT YOU’RE HERE.  IT’S NOT HUMANE!”  Just like the Madagascar penguins, the garbage man’s attitude was all “smile and wave boys, smile and wave,” because he just looked at the lunatic leaning out of the second floor window and then smiled and waved.  

 So, after two restless nights, I was hopped up on coffee (I was practically freebasing the stuff at one point) and I was walking to work and passed by an AMC TV pilot being filmed called Rubicon.  Although it wasn’t like seeing Don Draper on set, I still thought to myself how cool it is to live here.  Sure, sometimes we get so used to seeing things filmed in New York that we’re like “whatever, I’m hungover and late for brunch, I don’t care,” but it’s one of the things I try to still enjoy and try not to be jaded about (I’ll save the jaded part for dating).

Flash forward to three cups of coffee later and I’m willing myself to go to an international pro bono event that I had been excited to attend.  I took the 4 train and expected to be in Grand Central in no time.  Au contraire…I didn’t step off the train until an hour later.   I “may” have dosed off for 5-10 minutes after the train conductor announced that we were stuck in pergatory, i.e., between 28th Street and 42nd due to a sick passenger on the train ahead of us.  My memory flashed to an A.M.NY article that claimed that a lot train delays due to sick passengers are a result of skinny girls who starve themselves and passout on trains.  It was dinner time.  You do the math!  I wanted to point out to anyone who would listen that I hadn’t slept in 2 days, but I wasn’t screaming for a medic?  But it’s NY and no one cares, which is one of this city’s greatest attributes and greatest downfalls.  So I decided to shut my eyes and took a nap and I was awoken to a panhandler’s Comedy Central stand up routine in which he was impersonating the train conductor’s sick passenger announcement and the sound that the train doors make when closing.   Then he started saying he needed money/food for his kids, you know, the typical New York panhandling subway spiel (there’s another woman who has been riding the Lex line for years and who uses different names, sometimes she’s Andrea, sometimes she’s Colleen, but she’s always a widow with two kids who recently lost her job and always has a better manicure than I do and who once had the chutzpah to ask me if I could give her dollars in exchange for her panhandled change.  Do I look like Chase Bank lady?).  But here’s where Mr. Comedy Central does a weird thing…he whips out a picture of his “dead wife” wrapped in a ziplock bag and says, “this is my wife…I spoke to her on the phone on Easter, she hung up the phone and dropped dead.  Right there…she dropped dead.” Almost in the same breath, he turns to some white girl who gave him money and said, “Thanks white lady…you’re not bad for a white woman…you and me could go out and maybe get married and then create another little Obama.” Letting the “not bad for a white woman” comment slide for a moment, um, I thought you were the grieving widower?   While he was emptying people’s pockets, the subway started to move and I started thanking Jesus for getting this show on the road because it was taking all I had not to jump off at Grand Central and hail a cab back home and crawl into bed.  Unfortunately, we move all of 30 feet before the conductor got on the horn again and said, “so, um, yeah, we had a sick passenger on one of the trains ahead of us at Grand Central…they took her off and then the train directly in front of us had a woman on it that had a seizure.”  There was about a 3 second pause and then the entire train started laughing.  I even said to the guy next to me, who by the way was laughing like Santa Claus with a bowl full of jelly, that it’s unfortunate and we shouldn’t laugh, but it was funny.  And I thought about how all type-A most of us here are and how we can’t stand delays and then something like that causes all of us heartless bastards to have a collective laugh because seriously, what are the odds?  

I caught the eye of this hot latin guy at the end of the car (I was mid-car so no chance of conversing) and we started smiling and holding eye contact longer than is appropriate and then played the eye looking game for the rest of the trip (kinda made me think of the Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson Wedding Crashers church exchange about the, um, eye flirting).  When I exited the train at Grand Central I knew we would lock eyes again and when we did he waved bye.  I had considered staying on the train and continuing onto the UES with him, but that would’ve been awkward and stalkerish.  Side bar, I have got to come up with a plan of how to deal with these situations.  Maybe I’ll make up business cards to slip to hot guys like they do in the bars in the movies and say all sultry and suggestively, “call me.”  Speaking of movies, one thing that has bugged me is the filming of the first kiss between a couple…the “I’m not sure if we’re going to kiss, but we’ll both lean in and then pull out and lean in and pull out” kiss and then we’ll have the most amazing first kiss ever?  Has ANYONE ever had that happen?  I doubt it! It might be awkward and it might be bad, but it’s not that cliched first kiss thing.  Ok, off on a tangent again (sorry, lack of sleep)…so I got off at Grand Central and I ran smack dab into another camera crew.  It’s possible I’m going to end up in some random movie or tv show or SNL skit sometime in the future looking vaguely confused and extremely tired, but thankfully still tan. Anyway, moral of the story is even though it’s a chaotic and unpredictable place, there’s no place else I’d rather live.