Our Brain on Tango

Our brain on tango is, in a word…FRIED!

If we could peek inside our head during a tango lesson, we would see a bunch of morons, uh, neurons, spinning out of control and making us wonder if we should switch to bowling.

Whatever the teacher says in an hour, all we hear is blah blah blah Connect!   blah blah blah Walk!…blah blah blah Together!               

 In the time it takes to take even one step in sync with a partner, we could have earned a master’s degree in How Walking Works.

It is not humanly possible to absorb all the information presented in a tango lesson.   When we try to focus on just one thing, everything else falls apart.   Again and again and again.

We love to share our misery, so we try to get other people hooked by telling them that tango is “just walking.”  Well, if tango is “just walking” then, opera is “just singing,” chess is “just a board game” and Comme il faut is “just a pair of shoes.”

 After countless miles of galumphing around the floor, we get it that becoming a desirable partner in the foreseeable future is a fantasy.  But it’s too late.  We are pathetically smitten.

Some call it “passionate” but that’s just a polite way of saying we are stubborn, obsessed and have a deep-seeded need to prove that we are not lacking the gene that controls this foot goes here that foot goes there.

Most of life’s activities involve predominately athletic or academic skills.  Tango involves every physical and mental skill known to man, plus coordinating them with music AND a partner.  If anything else were packed into this dance, it would qualify as a religion for non-conforming smart people who like to dress up.

After a while, once in a while we accidentally share the same wave length with a partner before chaos sets in.  It’s just enough to make us feel a little smug and continue to subject ourselves to intimidation and a shriveling, quivering ego.

Gradually our brain morphs into a mutaninzed version of its former self and pumps addicting messages into our central nervous system like …blah blah blah…WOW!…blah blah blah…MAGIC!…blah blah blah SHOES!..and the kicker…blah blah blah…MUST….HAVE….TANGO!