As I was making the bed this morning I found myself humming “Tango Jalousie.” It’s a melody* that has been used for ads and other things, and is familiar in that in-the-background-of-western-culture sort of way. But it’s also familiar to me because when I was… 9? My parents decided that my brother and I should learn to tango.
Insert glyph of “huh?” here.
This was in the 60s, mind, when the Bossa Nova was in. The Twist. The Frug. The Mashed Potato. Not the tango. But my father liked to tango, and felt that somehow this would be a civilizing influence on his hell-spawn young.
The tango was initially considered a scandalous dance, one which dismayed the proper citizens of Buenos Aires (where it first emerged) in the 1880s. The partners stand so close together! (Bear in mind that seventy years the tango emerged, the waltz was considered vulgar and outré for the same reason.) The tango’s origins were a mix of African and European influences, and it was a dance of the poor people. Like jazz, the tango came from the margins and–like jazz–it took over. By the early 1900s the tango had become a European dance craze. It had its rises and falls, and by the time I learned it it was…quaint. Where some of my classmates might have been forced into dance classes where they learned the two-step or foxtrot, no one I knew was tangoing. Except me and my brother.
It’s not a difficult dance; the pattern is simple: 1-2 1-2-3. The steps can be taken in a straight line (a la Gomez and Morticia Addams) or, as we did, in a box. Step forward on my left, then right; step back on my left, step a little further out on the right, then bring the left in to join the right. The second three steps are a little faster than the first two. Once I could do that without falling over, Dad introduced other steps (my favorite was a sort of zig-zagging step where he held on to my elbows and turned me right and left, back and forth, for a count of five to the tempo of the music). And there were dips–Dad did not drop me backward as in the illustration here. Mine was just a slight bending backward, supported by his hand (nor did I wrap my leg around him. We didn’t have that kind of relationship). I assume my mother was teaching my brother roughly the same things: I wasn’t watching him, I was watching my feet.
Years later, when I was a theatre major in college, my ability to tango reliably (and to follow–or occasionally lead a dance partner who didn’t know how to lead) won me a certain amount of performance cred. “How did you learn that?” a director asked me. “My father taught me.” Silly me, I thought everyone learned the tango at home.
________
*familiar enough that Mad Magazine set lyrics to it, which I recall as “Jealousy, how could you do this to me? Because my eyeball just fell into your highball…” Which is hilarious if you’re eight years old… or my mother.