"Very Lovely" is the only way to describe last weekend in Providence. Which one was the best, the beautiful connection with A., the calm industry at J.'s, or the rush of playing Tango violin? I can't pick a favorite, but once again I've returned from Providence feeling totally inspired.
Yes, I definitely got in touch with my inner hedonist. :-) But I always remember, even while reveling in the lush sensuality of Tango, that it's not real life. It's lovely all the same.
Memorial Day weekend is now over, and it's now been 4 years since I was paralyzed by MS. I spent the anniversary playing the violin and then dancing Tango until 1:30 a.m. There were so many people at the milonga that I didn't even get a chance to dance with everyone I wanted to dance with, but it was a great night.
After that night of Tango bliss, I almost would feel OK being paralyzed again, just because I could look back and know that I really lived. I hope I won't need those memories too soon, though.
I've been doing nothing but teaching high school, developing curriculum, teaching violin, playing gigs, and sleeping (with a little home improvement thrown in here and there) since the end of August. Haven't been out to Tango since...sometime in the Spring? Criminal. Today I saw a posting on the Portland Tango list about Tango de los Muertos. Tonight I angled for an invitation to the Monster Orchestra (I tried not to beg...). Oooooooh I so want to go. Forget the dancing--it's an entire weekend of Tango violin.
Saturday afternoon, while driving home from a wedding gig, M. and I attempted to think of double bass players who might want to play in a Tango band. No dice. And electric bassists are pretty much out, since I want somebody who can bow an upright.
Tonight I hauled myself downtown to go to the Sunday practica (not having danced since June). There I met an old high school classmate, (a pianist), and as she described the gig she'd played on Saturday night it dawned on me that she was not describing a piano gig. Nope, when she started talking about trying to find an electric upright so she wouldn't have to haul around "this cavernous sound chamber" I realized that she now plays bass. And she loves Tango. And, as I quickly discovered, is totally psyched to get a group going.
Woohoo!
On Monday my last violin lesson ended at 4:40. At 5 p.m. my lights were out and I was fast asleep until waking at my usual 5:45 a.m. on November 1st. Halloween grump? Nope.
No, I was just recovering from my big Tango weekend down in Boston/Cambridge. After a Sunday full of shopping with E., rehearsing with the orchestra, going to dinner with my parents (who came to Boston to visit with some family friends at a hotel downtown), dancing for 2 hours at the milonga, playing a set with the orchestra at 11 p.m., dropping off S. and J. at South Station at 12:30, and then getting on the road to Maine, I finally fell into bed at 3:15 a.m. to sleep for a couple of hours before getting up to teach school. Yikes. Hence my reluctant Halloween boycott.
During the weekend I learned how to make some really awful noises (on purpose!) with my violin. Scratchy, percussive stuff for Tango. Most of the people in the orchestra were totally chill and fun to play with, so it was a good time, and Hector is an absolutely amazing musician.
The only thing I regret was that I was antagonistic towards the first violinist, who was very good. Things got off to a rough start when she breezed into the first rehearsal and picked up my violin to look at it without asking. My heart was in my throat; I saved money for my violin for 10 years and bought it instead of buying a car and it is my baby and only people I know and trust are allowed to handle it. At that point I didn't even know she was a violinist, but even so it's rude (in my opinion) to pick up anyone's instrument without asking, particularly if you don't know them. Also, during rehearsals she was a diva and that attitude always makes me grouchy...but still I am kind of mad at myself that I didn't do a better job of letting it slide and abasing myself at her feet so I could learn all of her Tango violin secrets. I always expect people who make beautiful music to also have beautiful souls and to be intelligent and patient teachers...and that's just not the way life is. Somehow this always surprises me. You'd think I'd learn. Sigh.
It was still a good weekend. Now I have a ton of stuff to work on once Nutcracker is over and that is totally cool. I had some nice dances with J., who has developed a nice feel since I last danced with him in May. And I would have danced with M. for hours had I not needed to go on stage with the orchestra. M. is such a lovely dancer, and he listens to the music, and he now lives in Portland. Woohoo!
Two different people remarked on my centered-ness while dancing, so I think my Tango has improved. In fact, I think it's far better than it was pre-MS. It hardly seems possible, but there it is.
Now knocking madly on every wooden thing in sight. :-)
Our tango trio has now had 2 rehearsals, and our first real performance will be at the Downeast Country Dance Festival in March. The question of a name for the group came up today over e-mail and I sat down to ponder it a bit this afternoon. First I hit upon "labia", (which means "eloquence" in Spanish), and was thinking "Tango Labia" would be a great (albeit slightly risqué) name for an all-girl group who loves to talk during rehearsals. It finally came together when I was lying around at L.'s and mentioned to her that I wanted to use "labia" because "tengo mucha labia" means "I have the gift of gab". It took her only a second to realize that we needed one more word to make this an incredibly painful pun (the best kind!)
Tango Mucha Labia.
After that, there wasn't really any discussion of other names. It works on so many levels.
Saturday, March 18th brought both MS-y numbness and Tango Mucha Labia's first gig (at the Downeast Country Dance Festival). It went quite well, all things considered, and many people were asking when we would be playing again.
On Sunday, after a visit to the Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, I grabbed my violin and headed downtown to Acoustic Coffee, where I sat in on Les Beaux de l'Aire's second set. That was tons of fun, despite me not having a clue what was going on most of the time. :-) There were a couple of nice moments, and I loved playing with the trumpet on "When You Were Smiling".
Still feeling weird this week, but slowly getting better. Violin students are looking so relaxed these days that I keep having visions of Gary Larson's "Boneless Chicken Ranch" cartoon, with chickens draped everywhere.
"The Chocolate Bar" is really named "The Bar of Chocolate Cafe", but I like the misnomer better. This week a bunch of us Tango folks went there on Wednesday after the practica, ate, drank, and danced in this cute little cafe on Wharf Street (the 2-block-long cobblestone street halfway between Commercial Street and Fore Street), downstairs from The Wine Bar. Tonight we met there again--not so much dancing this time since it was more crowded, but still a great atmosphere and an agreeable kitchen staff who will bring me sandwiches without the bread, artfully presented. We'll probably take it over for an informal milonga on a slow night, maybe Mondays, as part of the "get out and dance in restaurants" focus group of the Portland Tango scene. What fun!
What I liked about my long weekend teaching tango with M. at Pinewoods, in no particular order:
I sometimes tell new tango dancers, "it's not so much where your feet are going, but how you're getting to the next step." It's the posture, the windup, the compression into the floor, the speed/slowdown of the middle of the motion that makes tango really look like tango (even if you're just walking forward). Likewise, I often tell my violin students, "it's not so much where your finger lands [even though that's important], but how you get to the next note. I want graceful finger motion!" because every time, improving the quality of the movement improves intonation also--and improves it in a natural way that comes out of having great posture and beautiful motion.
This summer I've been working on improving the frame of my hand by playing Suzuki Book 1 in octaves (only because I just can't get myself to practice scales). I've also been working on comfortable shifting technique by playing everything in Book 1 up an octave or an octave plus a fifth or whatever necessary to practice fairly challenging shifts. In doing both of these exercises, I'm most interested in getting to the next note gracefully.
Last time I learned to play the violin, graceful motion was not stressed. In the beginning, I know my teachers made sure my fingers were going down right, etc., but when I got to a lot of the advanced stuff I just muscled my way through it. This time around, I lack muscle, so I have to do it with technique. And you know, it takes far less time and work to master things like shifting and hand frame when I'm concentrating on posture and graceful motion.
Yesterday I started playing the Fugue from Bach's Sonata #1 for unaccompanied violin, to see how my left hand is doing. The Fugue is a doozy of a finger-twister, with double-, triple-, and quadruple-stops all over the place, and countermelodies (being a fugue...) woven through the melody so thoroughly that I often wonder why the heck Bach didn't just write the thing for 2 violins and save the poor solo violinist all of this agony. Anyway. I never quite mastered it as a first-time violin student and never enjoyed hearing myself play it--it was too choppy with all of the wild jumping around in the left hand.
So yesterday, as a second-time violin student who now has beautiful posture and has been thinking about graceful finger movement, I realized that I'm the teacher I needed the first time around--someone who could show me that this fugue is not about torturing the violinist, but about figuring out how to achieve finger motion so beautiful and natural that playing this ridiculous number of notes actually feels comfortable and fun. I paused in measure 4 at the end of the phrase (F# and C) to think about the beginning of the next phrase, wondering how I could use my new technique to make the passage beautiful instead of abrupt. For a change. Hmmmm.
As I later told L., I had my first and second fingers down and was thinking maybe instead of letting go with my whole hand, I could sort of sneak the third finger underneath the other two fingers and then, with the third finger down, release the other fingers to let my hand expand into position for the next triple-stop. At that moment, I had this vision of me sitting on the climbing wall at Mission Cliffs, knowing that my free foot had to sort of fold itself under me into some totally uncomfortable position in order to get to the next foothold--a position so weird and unnatural-looking that I couldn't believe that I was supposed to do it. But if I just relaxed and went for it (gracefully), the instant it connected, the rest of my body could pivot on that new foot into the next, comfortable position I needed. The motions are exactly the same for the violin, but with smaller appendages. :-)
Now I totally love this fugue, and have to take a hold of the reins and not work on it too much, for fear of tendonitis, and am already thinking maybe I can go have a lesson on it with G. so we can talk technique. Whee!
My friend J. is looking for a girlfriend and has a profile up on match.com that I've been discussing with him during the last couple of weeks. Checking out his profile online now in a list of my "matches", I'm thinking "never again". I burned out of match.com pretty quickly last year. Post-breakup, it occurs to me that I probably wouldn't have liked M.'s profile (if he'd had one), unless he'd gone through it with the spell-checker. :-) Sometimes I am a total spelling and grammar snot. Every once in a while a profile catches my eye, though, and I think I know why.
I like action. I like pictures that show people doing things--not necessarily posing on a mountain, but ones showing someone getting caught on the face by a dog's tongue or slipping on something or laughing wildly. I like it when a camera catches people in the middle of their lives. I like it when people post those photos.
Some people create motion with their words. Sometimes, on a good day, I can too, but it doesn't come easily. A skillful writer hooks me or grabs me or just tugs my sleeve a bit, or startles me into noticing something and my mind moves the way my body would move--it stops to look, it leaps forward, it jumps wildly between associations, making me dizzy and alert when I'm trying to fall asleep or propelling me into wakefulness from a chaotic dream.
Even playing the violin is half about the motion for me. People used to say, "you like computers and music--ever combine them?" but it's the visceral sense of playing the violin that I love more than anything. The violin comes alive under my fingers, the sound literally goes into my bones. It changes me as I breathe in and send my air through the strings. What is music but motion between notes, the limitless number of ways to get from one note to the next?
And tango. Perfect motion to music, with a partner, is better than almost anything. But so much of it depends on the partner, and it's very seldom that I have a really lovely dance. That kind of motion transcends normal movement--I know my legs are moving, my feet are moving, but it feels like one of my flying dreams when I'm just floating, with no association between my feet on the floor and the rest of me. These days I sometimes get that feeling playing the violin, too, and that requires no partner. Maybe that's why I've been staying home practicing instead of going out dancing.
Real people in motion are so much better than any photograph for me. Photographs fix someone in my mind in a way I don't like; I don't want to remember a photograph, which is too easy to do. I want to relive the moment when we got sick from laughing too hard or stepped in the wasps' nest or first danced at a milonga or just lay together breathing. Which is why I'm sitting around thinking about the Internet and flickr and match.com and blogs and communication and getting all tangled up in what I think is important and "real".
I also think about MS and about being motionless again, in body or in mind, and wonder whether I'll eat these words in 5 or 10 years.
Just returned from a tango band rehearsal for our performance at SWELL tomorrow night. We're ready to have a great time; come out and see us play! We'll be at the corner of Casco and Congress Streets. Event starts at 7:00 p.m. and we play at 8:35.
Now, back to school I go to unpack my room. Ack.
The tango band decided to participate in the Battle of the Bands at Tango de los Muertos this year. On the web site, bands are advised of the following:
The point here is not to choose the band with the highest level of musicianship - although that is important - but to choose the band that is the best TO DANCE TO. What makes a band great to dance to? For starters they have to have a strong, driving beat with few tempo changes; they should play repertoire that is familar to dancers; the music must have a good walking tempo (120bpm or faster); and please note that dancers don't necessarily appreciate clever arrangements.
Oh, puh-leeease. With the exception of the "good walking tempo" comment, I disagree with every statement in there. As a dancer who listens to the music (relatively rare in most tango communities, I realize, but that's another topic...), I live for music that's interesting, varied, well-orchestrated, and soulful. So unfortunately those tips had the effect of making me and the rest of the band want to mess with dancers' heads--just a bit. We've been so looking forward to it that we sort of forgot it was a competition until someone mentioned it the other night. Oh yeah--winning? We're not even going to try to win. But we'll try not to torture the dancers too much.
I just finished an arrangement of La Cumparsita, which we'll rehearse this Wednesday in preparation for the Battle. Strong, driving beat with few tempo changes: check. Familiar repertoire: check. Good walking tempo: check. Oh, yeah, it's also written in 5/4. Let the fun begin!
A rainy Saturday is fine when I've been to the farmers' market and am now indoors, finishing up my arrangement of Cumparsita while my houseguest snoozes on the couch looking so impossibly sweet that I'm sure it can't be legal. Tomorrow: a tango wedding reception!
What a sweet wedding on Sunday. The groom, (an artist and tango instructor), did the explosion of fanciful sketches all over the wedding program. The ceremony was outside at the top of a tiny ski hill in Manchester, NH. The bride and groom marked their wedding with graffiti. All very cute. I was there because J. asked me to come because it was a tango wedding and the bride asked him because he's a tango dancer. I was delighted to realize, when the groom arrived, that I knew the groom and several other dancers present. It ended up being a good time. It was mostly lovely to dance with J. If only dancing were real life. Alas, it's not.
Once I woke up with half of me not moving. I feel very fortunate that I got that wakeup call at age 26, rather than at, say, age 70, because now I don't waste my days. If I'm going to wake up again one day the way I did in 2001, I want to know that the day before I didn't waste my day. Now every night before I go to sleep I make sure I'm at peace with the way my life went that day.
I have not wasted my day today. I have spent 8½ hours of it at school and 6½ hours of it dancing and playing the violin. Exhausted? Yes. Full of life? Absolutely. I will feel like crap tomorrow but it will have been so worth it. Did everyone else feel my happiness tonight? Did M. feel it when we danced? I felt so happy to dance with him (and felt a couple of other unpublishable things that make me sort of go "hrmph" at myself, but oh well. I will not squash them). :-)
HOWevah, even in the interest of not wasting one's day, one should not dance Tango for more than an hour wearing clogs, even if they are one's really swanky shiny red clogs, and even though one's dance shoes were forgotten blocks away in the trunk of one's car. But only if one would like to have some skin on the bottoms of one's feet afterwards.
My phone almost never rings during the evenings, but tonight it seemed like every time I raised my violin to start a section of The Bach Fugue that is Way Too Difficult for Me, the phone rang.
Phone calls I received tonight:
#1 and #2: from cellist playing at this Saturday's wedding: We've been requested to play "It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing". Do I have the music? No. But I can probably play it by ear if I have 5 minutes to practice first; just tell me what key it's in.
#3: from L. : Should she buy 25 or 50 wax lips for people to wear to show their support for Tango Mucha Labia at the Battle of the Bands? Go with 50. You just can't have too many wax lips.
#4: from student: He can't go to the All-State auditions on November 17th because he has a class trip. Do I think he'll be ready for the auditions in Skowhegan on November 3rd? Well, we'll figure out how to get him ready in the next 2 weeks. Come early to lesson tomorrow so we can get some extra time in.
#5: from unknown: Hello, Victoria? Who? Victoria Green? No Victoria Green here, sorry. Most suspicious.
Dress rehearsal tonight at the Wednesday practica. Overall, a resounding success. It's so fun to play for dancers, and they were looking great dancing to the 5/4 Cumparsita arrangement. S. told me afterwards, "I can never count in 5/4, but tonight I just went with what sounded like the beat, and it was great! Keep giving us those great beats!" Now we can; last night TML had a long, really productive rehearsal and a lot of things just started gelling. I walked into rehearsal feeling nervous and walked out feeling silly, happy, and musically pumped. Woohoo!
Tried out the boots tonight, too (I was wondering whether I would be able to play in them). I guess dancing in heels over the summer (since the left leg became stable enough for heels) has paid off: I actually feel comfortable playing in the boots. Amazing.
L.'s bass wouldn't fit in M.'s car, so I took it home for the night. Bonita immediately climbed up on it and made it her new sleeping place. Now I just have to figure out how to teach school all day (oh geez, I think the asst. principal is observing me tomorrow), go to a long technology meeting, zip home and throw violin, bass, stand, outfit, dinner, and J. into the car, drive to L.'s, pick her up, drive to Biddeford, transfer all personnel and gear into M.'s car, and drive to MIT. And then breathe. And then change into the outfit. And then perform. And then dance for several hours. And then drive home. And then sleep for a few hours. And then get up and teach. Ack.
But it will be worth it.
Last night, pre-performance, Liz, Tina, and I agreed that the great thing about a [mostly] chick band is the getting ready in the bathroom part. We zipped ourselves into boots and wiggled into skirts and applied what seemed like a pile of makeup (to 3 girls who are usually clean-faced). ¡Tango Mucha Labia! Portland tango dancers distributed wax lips and took photos. The host band won the contest, as expected (and they deserved it), but we were relatively happy with our own performance. The first of many! It's fun to play with good musicians. It's even more fun to play with good musicians who are also crazy cool.
I danced a couple of torturously sensual sets with J. (who arrived from Providence just in time for our set) and ran into a dear friend from San Francisco, (which means I'll be going back down to Boston tonight for dinner + girl time and more dancing). At the end of the evening, we managed to cram 5 people, gear, and 4 instruments (including Liz's double bass) into Mike's SUV and very cozily made the drive back to the Biddeford Park-n-Ride, where I took the Portland crew (singing old faves like "Stairway to Heaven" to keep ourselves awake) home to our beds. I walked in the door of my house an hour and a half before I needed to be up for school, went to bed, woke up with the alarm clock, and wisely called in sick.
Whew. Good times.
Dancing until the wee hours and then driving 2 hours back to Portland is great, but now I'm all backwards. Home at 5:30 a.m., breakfast, and then to bed. Awake at 10:30 a.m., up at 11:00. And now eating lunch? Ack. Howevah, let's hear it for a body that lets me dance for 5 hours on not quite enough sleep, and then drive home afterwards. Feet are sore, even with gel pads. Toes got mangled a few times; the floor was very crowded.
It was so good to have dinner with A. The thought of having her close by again is very tempting, even though it would mean moving to Berkeley...
On the dancing front: first, holy crap. Body is working so well these days. D. used to tell me I wasn't dancing with my whole heart, like it was some kind of emotional problem. Nope, for me it was physical. Now that my body is working beautifully, I don't have to think about it anymore, and I can put my whole self into experiencing the feel of my partner. Wow. I had some amazing dances last night. I was hoping to have a good set with M., since I felt so good last night, but didn't feel a really strong connection there. I couldn't put my finger on why until he said goodbye at the end of the evening and I realized that, even though he's all smiles and banter, he has a wall up. I'm pretty sure it's a wall of the "let's have a great friendly relationship now that we're not dating, only I don't want to be too open because then you might think I like you more than I do" variety. I can't tell, but that's the feeling I got. Which is too bad, because it means our dances won't ever be really good.
Along with the soul-baring sensually immersive dances, I also had a few where I was wondering whether we were going to actually dance, or whether my partner was just going to clutch me on the floor. Very sketchy. One of those said after our set, "wow, it feels like we've been dancing for years." I replied, "yeah, I think that was a long set." Whoops! What he meant was "it feels like we know each other, because we danced so well together." I was thinking something slightly different. :-)
Side note: is hand-kissing back in style? After the third one last night I was starting to think, "yikes, maybe I should get out the hand salve and take care of these red knuckles, if they're going to be the recipient of so much attention..."
The ladies and gent of Tango Mucha Labia! The lips! The costumes! The staying up way too late at night!
When D. came to visit last July, he watched me teach a violin lesson. Afterwards he told me that the questions I ask my students surprised him. It's true, I do sometimes ask my students weird, open-ended questions about what they're doing.
When taking teacher training for Suzuki violin, one of the things that's stressed is the importance of asking very detailed questions that you know the student can always answer correctly. "Creating a 'no-fail' environment" is how it's worded, I think. I agree, it's very important to concoct the right question in order to get the answer that you want. Sometimes, though, I know the question I want but I don't actually know the answer I want. For a long time I agonized over this. What I've recently realized is that sometimes it really is the question that's important because it starts a thought process in a student. I don't necessarily care if they give me the "right" answer.
I often ask violin students questions like, "OK, on a scale of 1 to 10, how loose was your left thumb when you played that?" I really don't care whether the student thinks it was an 8 and I think it was a 2. If the student thinks it's a 9 then I say, "can you take it to 11?" "I thought you said 1 to 10!" (these kids haven't seen Spinal Tap...) And then we start getting goofy and into 3 decimal places and all heck breaks loose, but that student has focused his mind on being aware of a specific technical point and assigning a rating to it. After getting to a 10 on the student's scale, I'll ask a student to take that 10 and pretend it's a 4 on a new scale.
This week I reached a new level of "the answer doesn't matter" when I asked a student "which side of you is more relaxed? The left or the right?" He said, "the right". I was thinking the left. But I thought, huh, actually it might not matter whether his answer was "correct", because I'm only asking him to get him to think about it. I then said, "OK, now as you play that again, can you let your left side be as relaxed as your right side is?" And you know what? Both sides became more relaxed. His mind was on it.
The longer I teach violin, the more time I spend on creating self-awareness and teaching students how to listen to all kinds of different parts of their bodies, not just their fingers, because the day will come when they don't have a teacher to do the analysis for them. I spent so many years as a violinist trying to get my fingers to do the right things when I could have done it more quickly by concentrating on my shoulder, or my back, or my knees. It occurs to me that I'd also like to create this kind of awareness of process with my high school students, and it's something we talked about today, briefly, when I attended a conference on strategies for improving literacy. Watching yourself learn can make you learn more quickly and easily. And sometimes being aware will help you more in the long run than being "right" the first time.
Tara Tango Shoes happens to be in South Portland, and this Sunday she had a sale for local dancers. I jumped at the chance to go over, since I ordered a pair of black Celos in June and they still hadn't arrived. I ended up trying on a pair of the Celos in the metallic leather, which looked far better in person than on the Internet, and walked out of there with them instead of the ones I had originally ordered. I also ended up getting a size 8.5 instead of a 9.5 (!), so I was glad to have the chance to try them on.
By far, the most stable shoes I tried on were the Celos and the Alma. I was really surprised that the Alma felt so steady on the floor, but they were rock-solid. If I felt like spending another pile of money on a second pair of shoes, maybe I would get a pair of those. Or maybe I would just wait and have some heels made for me in Buenos Aires. :-)
Trying on fabulous shoes is fun, but so much more fun when surrounded by giggling ladies who are also trying on fabulous shoes. Many of the same gals were at the practica that evening and it seemed like we were all still feeling the giggly, festive atmosphere of the shoe sale (plus, a bunch of ladies were wearing the new shoes). Later, after going to Norm's with a bunch of the tango crowd, I was thinking how great it is to have so many fun, friendly women in tango. When I compare the tango women of Portland (having clothing swaps, parties, and working together at practices to improve) with a large number of the tango women in San Francisco, there's just no contest; the tango scene here is small but the people are fabulous.
And we have Tara Shoes. Whee!
Tonight was the third tango class in Portland that I taught with M. (note: how great that we can still teach together! With no post-relationship weirdness! Yay!) Afterwards, T. was remarking on how different my teaching style is from most tango teachers in the way that I concentrate on posture and being comfortable, and mentioned that maybe one of these days I could teach at one of the bigger workshops like Tango de los Muertos. My immediate reaction was something like "oh no, I couldn't do that, because I'm not glamorous and I don't pretend that I have all of the answers." T. said, "yeah, but that kind of thing gets old."
Does it get old? Then why does the tango community continue to support it? I can think of only a few fantastic tango teachers who are completely pedestal-free. Tango is so weird--there's the tango caste system: the top level of dancers/performers dance with each other and with a select few of the next level down. And so on down the line, until you get to the absolute beginners. Add to that the worshiping of tango teachers. Add to that teachers who need to improve their teaching mindset and skills before they can really call themselves teachers. T. said, "it was such a relief to hear you say, 'if I'm going to lose my balance there, I just put my foot down.' Like sometimes you're off balance--it's not just me." Wow. With all of that worship and self-flagellation going on, it's kind of a miracle that anyone can become a better tango dancer. Yikes.
Well, whatever, I hope I always just say no to pedestals. I hope I am always able to say, "yeah, that's a good exercise to do in the bathroom at a milonga when I'm having a bad night" without feeling self-conscious that I should ever have bad nights because I am a teacher sometimes. Yeesh. I hope I'm always able to reassure students and peers that I am always learning along with them. Because I learn as much from my students as they learn from me (maybe more). It should always be like that.
...to do a Tango Mucha Labia photo shoot in January, outdoors, with me wearing one of Liz's flimsy little tango dresses? And how come Liz got to wear my black pants while I somehow ended up being the one with the bare legs? I suppose it was the boots. Anyway. Nathan Eldridge is very talented. He shot some great photos this afternoon. I'll soon be using them to get the TML web site up and running.
Now I'm home, eradicating the remains of my congestion with a saltwater sinus bath, courtesy of Tina's turkey baster. :-) I find the whole sinus-flushing operation mildly yucky--a bit too stimulating for my poor sinuses. It's unbearable if the liquid moves too quickly. When I get it going slowly, it's not horrible enough for me to not do it, but unpleasant enough that I'm glad when I'm done. It does work magic on my congestion, though. Last night I could actually breathe for the first time in a week when lying horizontal.
This is how it goes: I meet a new leader at a practica or milonga. We have a beautiful dance. He holds me almost reverently. What about me is not OK with this? What makes me say something to diffuse this tension-filled longing? Tonight:
"I'm having trouble finding my center tonight because I'm full of parsnips."
Ack. I think maybe it is not the goal when dancing tango to make your leader snort with laughter?
This was totally true, by the way. I was full of parsnips, cooked by Liz and eaten during TML rehearsal. And it did affect my center. I believe I also used the term "parsnip gut". Sigh.
These days I need The Magic Forehead just to get through a day, to keep my mind from overloading from all of the things that are floating around in there, jockeying for priority. Fortunately I'm back from teaching tango at Bates and quickly succumbing to exhaustion, which will at least shut off the thoughts for some hours. On my mind:
- improving my violin teaching
- improving my tango teaching (needs lots of improvement, trying not to stress out about it)
- did I just teach the right stuff to those tango students? Oops...see above.
- improving my violin technique
- learning Spanish
- getting ready for trip to Buenos Aires
- exploring new/old relationship with past sweetie: good idea? Do not think too much about this
- but I miss the aforementioned past sweetie...whoops, see above.
- doing next arrangement for tango band
- how to improve tango band's technique
- finish those blue pants before I go to B.A.
- can I get a lesson with Ramiro Gallo when I'm in B.A.? And can I learn Ojos Negros in time to work on it with him?
- need to hang out with Mom
- need to hang out with Dad
- need to rewire my furnace thermostat with Dad
- finish J.'s Web site
- do TML's Web site
- improve Java curriculum
- how to get this student engaged in school? Can we talk in HTML code? And how would that work?
- finish 5 posts in the works for Violin Alchemist
- do I need to get certified in Math to be able to award Math credits if we have an Arts Academy?
- how can I feed myself during the week with no time to cook?
- how can I sleep more so my face isn't asleep all the time?
- need new socks
- need a top to go with my new skirt because the season just changed and now I can't order the top I wanted
Argh.
Clearly the answer is to quit some of these things...the only problem is that I love all of them. And doing different things means when I'm frustrated with one I can think about something else.
Tonight's "Milonga into the Light" at Portland Yacht Services was definitely a success. Beautiful space, live music (by ¡Tango Mucha Labia!), food, great decorations...and we broke even. All good things for the Portland tango scene. I personally was not happy about my violin playing, nor about my dancing, (though Tina came over and said I looked great, I didn't feel good at all). In general the band's ensemble felt a little off. We played much better during the sound check. Thinking back to our last performance, though, it's a huge improvement. Next time we have a gig I will try to take a nap in the afternoon, I think. Especially these days, when I'm completely fried at the end of a week.
Now, time to start planning my trip to Buenos Aires and to keep working on my intonation. Ack. I'm a little afraid that I won't feel good and won't dance or play well when I'm down there. But hey, hold on, my body is moving. I'm dancing tango and I'm playing the violin. Yow.
On Friday I put on my new pair of black tango shoes and washed dishes, thinking about what I'll teach before the milonga in Manchester next weekend. C. asked me to send him the title of my class so that he can publicize it. I finally decided on the following:
"Foundations of Musicality: Playing with Speed and Energy"
This technique class will increase your comfort and concentration during walking and pivots, and will help you achieve more dynamics in your dancing with complete ease of movement. We will use familiar figures to explore variations in compression and release of energy. Come see how easy it is to dance musically!
I wish I would have time to do a Boleo Clinic for followers, but sadly, I think it will have to wait for another day (unless I can figure out how to stick it in at the end). As I was thinking about compression, windup, and release, and practicing boleos at the sink, my floor became covered with black circles from the chrome leather soles on my new shoes. It made me think about how so many dancers spend so much energy trying to get their boleos to look right in the air, when the important part of the boleo happens on the floor. I left the circles to remind myself of this, but I suppose they'll have to go before Monday.
I could wait and save up money to buy another pair of ultra-comfy Tara Shoes...or I could buy shoes in Buenos Aires, and take advantage of the ridiculous exchange rate. On Monday, Dom and I set off on a Shoe Expedition. First stop: Tango8 and Loló Gerard, located across the street from each other in the Abasto neighborhood. I was looking out the window of the bus and knew exactly when we needed to get off: mannequins. On this stretch of Corrientes, almost every store is a mannequin shop. With heads, without heads, black, tan, lifelike and completely not...mannequin families in every window. Mind-boggling.
I did not buy shoes at Tango8 or Loló Gerard. Too uncomfortable and most styles had a far too open toe. I am not interested in getting my toenail kicked off. We lunched nearby and discovered the word for "fava beans" (porotos), which luckily went well with the beets we had ordered on our salad. :-)
During the afternoon we also went to see Fabio Shoes (for Dom) and NeoTango (for me). No luck in either place. NeoTango shoes weren't so comfortable either, and they had almost nothing in my size, probably due to dancers arriving for the Festival Tango de Buenos Aires and buying tons of shoes.
On Wednesday, after a quick stop at the museum of modern art, we headed to Regoleta for some sightseeing, lunched at the Design Center there, and then went to hit a couple more shoe shops. We stopped at Comme Il Faut, which was very quiet since they were closing in an hour. No shoes on display there--you describe what you're looking for and they bring you things to try on. No way. Totally uncomfortable and also waaaay too gaudy for my taste. Our last stop of the day was Segunda Generación. Those were definitely the most comfortable shoes yet, but I wasn't crazy about the style. They had a few classic styles, but looked like mostly a clothing shop. Hrmph.
Later in the week we went to Susanna Artesanal, and there I bought 2 pairs of shoes: a red pair that will be my "workhorse" pair: comfy, toe open enough for comfort but protected enough for careless dance partners, and a black pair that I just had to have. I'm not a fan of black shoes in general because I think they look kind of severe, but these sheer black ones were just the thing I needed.
An hour and a half before I left for the airport, I saw a display of DarCos shoes and totally fell in love with them. Next time I'll go visit that shop. I hope they're totally uncomfortable, because otherwise I will need a shoe budget. :-)
P. and I danced at a benefit in Auburn last night. I was a bit nervous for the first set, but by the end of the second set we were just having fun. Afterwards people kept marveling at the footwork and at my new heels (they do look a bit dangerous). I have no idea what my feet were doing, for the most part. I know exactly what the core of me is doing, and my feet just go under me. I think this is why I don't enjoy a lot of tango classes that focus on footwork without talking about whole-body movement. Anyway. I arrived back home at around 11:00 and unwound by putting a new hard drive into my G3 PowerBook, with Bonita's [un]help. And I marveled myself that a couple hundred people were watching three perfectly good feet and one foot that still feels just a touch wonky. But any foot that can dance in a spike heel has to be doing pretty well, I think. Or maybe I should say that if a wonky foot can dance in a spike heel, my abs are a lot better than they used to be. Now knocking on wood and thinking about taking both feet and pointing them outdoors.
Tonight Tango Mucha Labia played at the North Star Cafe on Munjoy Hill. Yay. Great space, great place to dance, easy for non-dancing diners to eat and watch the dancers without having to be in the dance space, and...a miracle! Three different kinds of gluten-free baked goods! Woohoo! They also have a gluten-free bread for sandwiches. This is good stuff. Tonight I needed FOOD before playing, after a last day at school moving around file cabinets, followed by teaching 5 violin lessons, followed by hoofing it over to the cafe. I chose some kind of oatmeal chocolate chip cookie with flecks of fresh mint leaves. Yum!
The other bonus is that the sound system there is decent, which means that we (well, really Mike since he owns the stuff) don't have to schlep a ton of sound equipment. And there's not a whole lot of setup/teardown. These are good things. These are things that make all four of us want to play there more often.
Whew. Now I will crash so I can get up and shovel mulch with Mom tomorrow. She is "taking the day off" which somehow means shoveling trailerfuls of mulch? I see where I got the go-til-you-drop genes.
Sometimes I tell my violin students to think of their fingers as "little legs" and we do leg movements first before trying a technique on the violin. Several weeks ago I was at an empty tango practica, practicing boleos, and I realized what I needed to do to clean up my boleos is to contract my hamstring at a certain point. It's easier with the right leg, since my left hamstring was one of the later muscles to come back to life.
Anyway, a few days ago I was practicing trills on the violin, something that's still tough and kind of hit-or-miss since MS, and I realized that the motion I need to perfect for trills is the same kind of motion I need to perfect for boleos, just with finger muscles instead of leg muscles. This is weird and cool and cosmic all at once.
It's hot, hot, HOT today, and STICKY. Ewwww. Bonita is flat on the kitchen floor. I am wishing I were at the beach, but instead I'm at home trying not to move until we drive downtown and get into the back of a U-Haul truck with other Tango Mucha Labia members and tango dancers wearing local art, ready to show up at undisclosed locations around Portland for impromptu Mobile Tango and Art Show performances as part of First Friday art goodness. Somehow the thought of packing myself (and my violin) into the back of a U-Haul truck in this heat is not making me extremely excited.
You get a bunch of Portland tango dancers in a room together and the topic is bound to come up: "any new places to dance?" Ayuh. You can't open a restaurant or bar in this town without someone from PortTango going by to check out whether there's a nice floor and a dance license.
Last night, sitting on the stage unwinding after our gig at the North Star Cafe (with wheat free goodies! Wheee!) Liz and I looked at each other and agreed that it's an official "scene". Live tango band, tons of dancers everywhere, new dancers who looked in and decided to take the free lesson, people eating and drinking and hanging out in this fabulous place...yes. This is good. And TML is booked there twice a month until November--2nd and 4th Mondays in September and November, and 1st and 3rd Mondays in October. I really need to do our web site. Argh.
The big question on my mind is "how do I teach a full day at school and then 6 violin lessons and then play tango for an hour, until 10:00?" Last night I hit a wall right before our last song. Hmmmm.
But it's happening. I heart my band!
At the end of the summer, I hired carpenter (and fellow tango-dancer) P. to finish up the downstairs apartment. I also hired P. to be my partner and assistant at an upcoming TML gig, where I will also be teaching a dance lesson. P. and I agreed that we should get together on Thursday and dance a bit, since we've hardly danced together since May. Playing all the time with TML means I don't dance much at milongas anymore!
Well, Thursday came and I was into day 4 of The Plague that has been sweeping the schools and I really needed to sleep, not dance, but when I came home late from school and saw that P. had painted both of the downstairs living rooms while I was at school and that I had to leave right then anyway in order to meet him on time...I went. We danced for 2 hours. We agreed today that it was great--we both felt like we'd accomplished a lot. For the first time in a long time, I missed dancing tango regularly.
Back at home, I opened one of the 9 books on teaching the creative process that I had gotten out of the library on Wednesday and almost immediately found a section about how difficult it is to switch from the left brain to the right brain. I have this problem all the time when teaching violin--it's hard to feel something and simultaneously describe it logically, and after I've taught for a few hours I have to get myself back into "The Forehead" --maybe that is the right brain?--before I can really play well.
I had a nice 2 hours of right-brain dancing on Thursday night. I've missed that, and I've missed violin now that school is in full swing and I have hardly any time to feed myself, let alone practice. Now I'm thinking about a book I read a while back on ADD and how some people with ADD have to do art every day to keep themselves relaxed. I feel the same way about playing the violin, and I'm suddenly wondering whether I can exercise the brains of my high school students with art. Next week I was planning to start doing exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, anyway. Now I am doubly resolved to do so.
Maybe I'm on the right side of the brain right now, because my left brain just took a look at this post that was supposed to be about how much faster my feet are, even since May, even when I'm tired and sick. But look what happened! I'm talking about brains and art instead. Hrmph. :-)
It did fleetingly cross my mind that probably playing video games is also a right-brain activity, but for my students that's a slippery slope.
"I didn't realize that tango was so steamy!" Sherry remarked a while back, after seeing me dance with P. I suppose it is. Part of the attraction of tango is the embrace, for sure. But even though dancing tango in close embrace and being perfectly in sync with someone can make me feel like I'm both flying and grounded in my partner, it's very rare that I will completely unleash sensual energy on my partner when we're dancing. This is due to one or more of the following:
So most of the time I just get out there and laugh a lot and have fun. And abide by my usual rule: dancing is not real life (which translates into: a dance interest is not a romantic interest unless I'm already interested for some other reason). But it would be fun to dance with full intensity sometime. I'll look for my chance.
Tango is a kissing culture: hi, how are you, kiss, kiss. I didn't really like it in San Francisco because I felt like it was kind of phony and that bothered me. I love it in Portland because I love the people I dance with. Tonight A. and K. had a housewarming party at their great apartment on Munjoy Hill, and after getting to meet a bunch of folks I didn't know, I found Liz out back in the kitchen. After a while all of TML was in there (how does that happen?) and then a couple of other tango dancers. P. showed off his always uncanny knowledge of astrology. He is really, really good at it. It's scary. And his gestures were gut-bustingly ridiculous at times. After a while more tango folks were in the kitchen, and then dancing started in the living room and then a bit later only the tango crowd was still around. Warm people. Kissing them is fine.
I brought my Fender electric violin with me to Saturday night's TML gig, along with Z's amp that Mike gave me to try out (Z is trying to sell it) so that I could plug a direct line into Mike's loop pedal for Reflejo de Luna. My brother gave me the Fender for Christmas just before I was paralyzed, and for many years I couldn't play it because the thing is so freakin' heavy. It's mostly solid body. I figured I could handle it for one song, though, so I hauled it along.
As we were setting up, Z arrived to pick up something from Mike and said "hey, I have a gig down the street but I don't care what kind of violin I play. I have my [insert name of some fancy electric violin that I promptly forgot] here--want to switch electrics?" (p.s. he's trying to sell it so he can go back to an acoustic). Two minutes later I had gotten out the chinrest wrench and switched our chinrests, and off he went with my Fender while I got to n