story time
miles & anna in houston 2008.
In October of 2006, I began taking Argentine Tango lessons with Daniel Trenner in Northampton, MA. At first I have to be honest with you, I absolutely hated it. Hated it. It made me feel small, insignificant, and really out of my depth. Daniel talked me into it though and we made arrangements for me to come back to see him and spend time learning tango. I was living in San Francisco, at the time, and my time with Daniel was originally supposed to be 2 hrs a day, for 2 weeks. Those 2 hrs turned into 6, and those 2 weeks turned into 3 months. For those of you who don’t know who Daniel is, he’s the reason Argentine Tango (not that Ballroom thing or Dancing with the Stars noize) exists in the form that it does in the United States today. Since that time, well let’s just say that tango became my life…in more ways than one.
Suffice is said that I obviously fell in love with the dance, I went back home to San Francisco, and then I ate, slept, breathed, and …..ummmm well you get the picture, about 12 to 15 hrs every single day for almost 2 full years. I gave up my day job to pursue tango full time. I left my friends behind, those who didn’t speak tango, I kinda dissed a bit; those who wanted to speak tango, I introduced to the dance. I stopped going to the things that I used to enjoy. I focused on tango to the exclusion of all else. So much so that there were times when I didn’t eat, I slept in my car for months at a time, and went social dancing every single night in the hotbed that is tango in the United States: San Francisco (yes I showered every day). I took 6 privates a week from 5 different teachers, went to every class that I could get my hands on, took lots of workshops, practiced every day RELIGIOUSLY, and generally became a fixture in the tango scene in San Francisco.
My tango influences, teachers, and who I have studied with have been: Daniel Trenner, Homer Ladas, Sean Dockery & Charity Lebron, Dan Peters & Pier Volkus, Mayumi Fujio, Jay Abling, Jennifer Olsen, Alex Krebs, Damian Lobato, Evan Griffiths, Korey Ireland & Mila Vigdorova, Nick Jones, ….just to name a few…
On top of that, I wrote a daily tango blog, tangobliss.com. Its now defunct. But in the YEAR that it was up, it garnered 6000 daily users at its height. It was recognized by the Wall St. Journal as “THE” tango blog to read. And when I wasn’t blogging, or practicing, or dancing, I was off at any one of the US tango festivals going on throughout the year. (For those of you who don’t know, a tango festival is not a competition but rather a social dance for the best and brightest that the Argentine Tango has to offer. It’s a way for those of us who are serious about the form to come together, share, exchange information, and most of all DANCE, dance, dance.)
When I started, I was the epitome of an addict. I was deep in the middle of my addiction, a disease in of itself for which there is no cure, except more of the disease. Very few people take the path that I took. I believed at the time that in order to do what I did, I felt I had to be fanatical, single-minded, and driven. For without that drive, I never would have achieved what I did in a very short space of time. Today I am a little more balanced about the dance….only every 7th word out of my mouth is tango vs. a year ago to where it was every 5th. Your mileage may vary….