1519  Notes from Buenos Aires 6

Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 15:01:59 -0500
From: Rick McGarrey <RICKMCG@FLASH.NET>
Subject: Notes from Buenos Aires 6

El 'Tenedor Libre'
(Part 1 of 2)

When I was young and poor I would sometimes go to all-
you-can-eat restaurants that had names like the 'Royal
Smorgasbord', and 'Kings Table'. On the theory that I
would be able to save money by skipping future meals,
I would usually eat my way to the verge of nausea.
Down here they call these restaurants 'tenedor
libres'. This means 'free fork', a place where your
fork, freed of all social and financial restraints,
can run wild like a gaucho on la pampa, across plates
of endless food. Well, it's not just food. Buenos
Aires is also a tenedor libre of tango... and I have
over-eaten. I've been having too much fun, and now I
need to pay the price. The fly in the ointment of
this tango paradise, and it's a big one, has caught up
with me. It is cigarette smoke. The cigarette smoke
in the milongas down here is terrible, especially in
winter when the windows are closed. Both Alejandra
and I have had coughs and low grade sore throats for
about a week now, and mine is starting to get
serious. I'm beginning to cough so much that I'm not
sleeping well. The doctor says either stay out of the
milongas until the irritation goes away and I start
sleeping better, or risk a downward spiral that could
end up in the hospital.

I've been enjoying the dancing tremendously down here,
more than ever before really, and it will be hard to
stay away. But I have to, so this evening Alejandra
and I rented a practice room on Entre Rios, and had a
great smoke free dance. Then we had a nice meal at
Hermann's, an old German restaurant in Palermo, and
for the first time since we arrived we had time to
really relax and talk about our tango marathon. Over
the last two weeks we went out early, stayed late, and
went to 18 different clubs all over the city (a quick
count that may have missed a couple), without ever
going into the 3 or 4 biggest ones downtown. Normally
I would burn out dancing that much. There's only so
much emotional energy, but every time I walk down the
sidewalk toward one of those old doorways and hear the
music, I perk up. We are like sled dogs that just
want to run and run, and we probably would have kept
running if I didn't get sick. I don't even know why
we did it, because we're not pressed for time. We'll
be here awhile. It was just a lot of fun.

I was feeling that with so much dancing and elbow
bumping and dodging that our dancing might have
suffered, but Alejandra said she didn't think so.
Sometimes you set a high standard for dancing while
practicing that is hard to maintain in the milongas.
Enrosques and long corridas are great, but they don't
work well when you're dancing shoulder to shoulder
with the retired bus drivers of Avellaneda on Sunday
night. Some of the milongueros have a bit of a sloppy
technique, but most of them don't care too much, and
of course they've got a couple of other things going
for them- like about 10 thousand hours of moving
around crowded dance floors listening to tango music.
They are the journeyman bricklayers of tango. What
they do looks simple and easy, until you try to do it
yourself. (Of course, they are also the royalty of
tango as well).

I asked one of the milongueros about a problem I have
sometimes where I lower my head when I dance. The
answer was, 'Do you want to be a dancer of the stage?
It's not important.' But it's not good to be too
sloppy, so we used the practice room to work on the
walking and posture that we hadn't been paying much
attention to in the milongas. It's a fine balance.
Down here, if they say your dancing is 'elegante',
that's good. If you hear the word 'academia' when
they talk about you, that's bad.

(End of part 1. Part 2 continues in 'Notes from
Buenos Aires 7 ')