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Intimacy and Argentine Tango on a Monday Night
I came away with more than The Basic and The Ocho al Frente
When I saw online that my dance class was going to be taught by a man named Helmut, what my reality looked like was not what I had imagined.
Helmut was a small framed man who looked vaguely to be of Asian descent. I’ve rarely ever seen someone whose ethnicity was that elusive. He had very short hair and a small white beard at the tip of his chin that showed his age. When he introduced himself, I was expecting “Helmoot.” What he said was “Helmet.”
He asked if I had ever danced the Argentine Tango and I told him it was my first time. He asked what took me so long. The best answer I could muster was, “Traffic was a bitch.”
I was only partly kidding. Much of my life has resembled sitting in a car waiting for something to start moving. I’ve hit a point where I’ve simply gotten out of the car, abandoned it on the freeway and started walking. Like some weird apocalytpic revelation that if I don’t do it, I might not get out alive.
Tonight, I walked right into an aged ballroom dance studio in a mostly abandoned strip mall not far from my house. It was more…
