How Choose A Husband by Dancing

Well it’s official. I am advanced. Or maybe intermediate. Anyway I did the harder tango class that follows the easier tango class. It was a learning experience. Here’s how it goes:

We learn something difficult. In this particular case it was called ‘the box step’, a misnomer if there ever was one. It was more like ‘If you ever get your head round this step you are capable of flying to the moon on a cranberry step’. As far as I could make out, which wasn’t much, you were supposed to swivel one way, then swivel the other way, and then by some miracle end up facing the original way. Ha. So, after having practiced a bit (which frankly didn’t help at all as I really kept swivelling the wrong way followed by the wrong way followed by another wrong way) we do the ‘taxi system’. This has nothing to do with those elusive vehicles that are impossible to find on a Saturday night in town and if you do someone has just thrown up in it. It means that at one end of the room your somehow pair up with an unsuspecting man, tango merrily to the other end of the room and then abandon the aforementioned partner just as you were getting the hang of his idiosyncrasies. You then walk up to the top of the room again whilst contemplating why that last bit went so horribly wrong and partner up with another partner.

It’s this partner-swapping business that is so illuminating. Or not just the swapping but the whole trying to follow these assorted men’s leads. In tango the men lead. Apparently with the heart. Ah. Yes. Well. Maybe some do. These are obviously the ones to look out for. Rare as hen’s teeth, rabbit’s walking sticks and triceratops in ballet shoes. However the nature of a whole lifetime of potential marriage is revealed in that one journey down the village hall. Here’s how it goes:

Bloke A – holds you so tight the chances of breathing before 2009 are extraordinarily slim.

Bloke B – tells you that if you only took bigger steps backwards then he wouldn’t keep stepping on your newly purchased and very shiny dance shoes.

Bloke C – has no idea that he is actually supposed to be leading and thus you end up simply strolling down the room together and wonder if you have come to tango class at all or are attending a meeting of the ramblers.

Bloke D – leads as if he is driving an imbecilic donkey down a very stony path in the nether reaches of a Mediterranean country.

Bloke E – fumbles about with his feet in a rather inadequate manner, but has the grace to say, as we reach the other end of the room, ‘Oh, I was enjoying that.’

Marriage eh?

There was one man, however, who somehow manoeuvred me down the room without my even having to think about it. It was one of those ‘zone’ moments like when you are driving and no longer have to wonder what gear you are in, what that black thing in front of you with whites lines is, and whether you have actually switched the car on. It was, ironically, or perhaps poetically, the man I came in with. Sadly, or perhaps ironically, or definitely not poetically, it was not my husband.

Life eh?