Tuesday, January 30

Don't cheat me this dance!

You always want to talk it through, this I never understood. Listen to me when I say "I am not going to have a discussion with you today". If you insist I shall say "good-bye!". All I want is for you not to just stroke my hair but instead: lead me 'here', dance me 'there', show me off 'everywhere'. Let me get my tango fix and I help you get yours.

Why is it so difficult for you to understand this? I want 'you' to be in control and I also want to know that I am going to be "OK!", there with you.

This is "Tango" and I don't care even if you are gay, be a Man this evening and any other, in fact any day whenever you ask me to dance these songs! Although it is perfectly fine to be gay but there is no comparison between dancing with a man and a lady-boy.

I want you to dance me physical, I want you to make me dance this tango the way it should. By the way I have no intentions to meet your mother, I just want your body touching mine, and am not going to ask you if you will still love me tomorrow. Relax! All I want you to do now is for you to be stronger than I.

It is magic if you hold me sure, I don't want us to grow apart, let me have a secure embrace. But ....please, don't squeeze me that tight because I need my lungs to work by their own! Leave me some room, I need air if I am to survive to the end. I hate to think that I need to say "Thank you!" when we shouldn't have to.

Don't cheat me this dance or the next: Let me know by your body where I am going with my feet, lead me those steps, now and in the next. I can't choose them - the steps - I never enjoy doing them just on my own, you are "the man", do yourself a favour and lead me them because I love to follow when I dance.

Don't describe me the moves, I need no lectures from you, there is nothing I want you to teach me, for those I go to lessons. I just want you to let me feel secure knowing where my feet are to follow yours. Remember you are my lead, not teacher, lover or god forbid the enemy or worse of all: these thrown into one.

One more thing, make sure I am the one who looks pretty. Tango is about the Women and not 'you', and that is why "This Is Tango!": That is the way this game is played.

Remember I am your universe till the ends, through all these songs, dance me round, and stop looking around. I can be your dream follower if you don't cheat me these tango songs.

MilongaCat.

Friday, January 26

"Her Tango"

Somethings are complete and need no comments.
Let's enjoy!
Thanks to Nicole Du Cane's for her clip.

Monday, January 22

Tango, Maths, Discounts and Workshops Bookings!

We go to our Milongas to take lesson and to dance Tango. Tango makes us feel and experience romance, love, passion, and so many other human emotions however it has been a while now that we also need a degree in Mathematics to understand what it costs us.

The entry fees and costs to attend our milongas are getting gradually so complicated to understand and decipher that many are confused and totally lost and sometimes even out of pocket .

There are all sorts of schemes: Membership, No Membership, with and without partner(s), turning up 4.5 or more times a week(!), twice a month, penalty of extra fee for once in a blue moon attendance, extras for sunny day on Wednesday, 1 lesson discounted price if it is a rainy day on 2nd Tuesday morning of the month and you must also book and pay to turn up on the 3rd Thursday the following month.

We may read their notes and
find out: any mentioned discount is only available if tickets are booked before lunch times and that we are to collect the pre-b tickets on a specified date like a Friday that happens to be 3 weeks prior to our actual booking dates.

We are also told things along such lines:
"You will be entitled to get any possible discounts by filling in a formal application only which must be returned by registered delivery in post. Such a discount will apply if you book and pay for 14 or more tickets when used in the next 3 weeks but are only valid if you spend minimum of 3 bookings with yet "an unknown teachers" on workshops titled "what to do with your partners' free leg(s) if she is wearing the wrong colour shoes on the 4th Saturday of the month between the hours of 12-00 and 12:30 am".

OK....am I getting close enough for many to recognise their own postings in tango-uk yahoo newsgroups? ;-)

I suppose what it comes down to is that many organisers who do such schemes as above - believe me the above were are not very far fetched from their reality! - they actually sit down with a calculator of some kind and build their pricing. They also want to find themselves "Captured Audience". To encourage and entice their customers to spend more money and time there suddenly bring about their Marketing gimmicks. Consequently they come up with the most bizarre and complicated systems of bookings, attendance, and undecipherable discount systems.

A lot of times I wonder if these guys have any idea themselves what their systems of membership and discounts mean.

The message to some of you (nice!) people is:
Common guys, be inviting and enticing but please for the sake of everyone's sanity: "KEEP IT SIMPLE" and stop penalising "the poor suds" who are not your "cash cows" all of the times!

MilongaCat is back!

(p.s. Thanks to 24tango)

Friday, January 19

Who is Milonga Cat?

First of all there came the Milonga Cat , then soon after wards came all the copy-cats.

So the current copy-cats are: Tango Cat, Waltz Cat, Disco Cat, and the Puzzy Cat.
I am going to let them try it my way, not just here but all around the world to spread the word.


A message to all those copy-cats: Beware! There are some out there who are simply barking mad. They would attack any one of us: cats (including the copy-cats), thinking that you maybe a Milonga Cat!

Enjoy me, him, her, and all my other copy cats. (Now watch the Video!)



Milonga Cat is back!

Sunday, January 14

Nora's Tango Week 2006 (USA)

Nora's Tango Week 2006 in San Francisco featuring Miriam and Hugo, Jorge Firpo, Nito and Elba (Elba was not available during performances), Fernanda and Guillermo, and Nora and Ed. This is a great example of modern Argentine Tango, and this is the best event to attend for enthusiasts and practitioners on the west coast of the USA.

Saturday, January 13

WHAT IS DANCING?

"Dancing is not getting up any time painlessly

like a speck of dust blown around in the wind.

Dancing is when you rise above both worlds,

tearing your heart to pieces and giving up your soul."

~ Mevlana Jalal al-din Rumi- Persian Poet (13th century)

Wednesday, January 10

Tango millenium

Tuesday, January 9

Love hurts.

Sometimes love hurts, and sometimes maybe too much and also for very long. Those who have truly loved know of this hurt. Everyone learns it sometime in their lives, love comes with some accompanying pain. The hurt and pain are the relative costs that are due if one is to experience love.

He was no stranger to her temper. To say that she was a loose canon if one rubbed her the wrong way was not an understatement. That was part of her attraction for him from the very early on. The feisty and fiery character of hers was passionate; she loved life to the full, and lived the life on the very edge in order that she could feel love.

The reason for the hurt and pain is simple: love needs passion to survive, and since passion is the fire that lights up our souls it can only burn bright if it feeds itself on the juices of our lives. That is why true love hurts so much, sooner or later love always extracts its costs. Love is never free, it fools us to think that it is but the price is often real high.

Their argument had started well before they had reached the milonga. It was like a storm brewing and it suddenly flared up once they got there.

He said "It is all in the past! "We have always been just friends, you can not possibly think there has ever been anything else more to it! How can you?.... this is really silly now."

She just looked away and stared into a place that was not clearly there at all. She was trying to look for something that was residing perhaps beyond the world of their anger and argument, or something that was not definable by any shapes or colours. She tried to look for something that she could remember fondly, something that still belonged to not too distant past and was not obscured. She searched for an image that was clear and bright, dependable, joyful, real, and more than anything else: comforting.

Her rage would not let her. She felt she needed her rage on her side. She did not want to lose herself to the simplicity of just wanting the end of what had started her feelings boiling over like this.

She did not and could not understand how and why She loved him so deeply. She only knew that she felt so happy to be with him, near and next to him. There was no wonder therfore that She hated these moments that led to their inevitable shift away from each other. The emotional and physical distance that followed these angry arguments made her weak in her determination to get her points across. This she could not stand about herself.

She hoped he could say something more, something that was more reassuring. She wanted to hear him say words that could give her all the ammunition she needed to fight his battle for him in her mind. She wished so much that he could help her win the argument for him both in her heart and her mind. Only if he had, anything was better than nothing at all, it would have calmed her down. But so typical of him, he did not say a word, this made her even more annoyed with him. With such low levels of emotional inteligence, to her he was a lost poppy, he looked weak. She had loved him to be strong for her and at times like this he never was.

She had left her loneliness behind since she had met him. She was never aloof or shy but after they had met she had become a complete bundle of laugh and joy.

"So why does it hurt so much?" she asked herself quietly once more. "I have loved and been in love in the past too, it is not as if this is my very first time feeling that I am being in love, so why am I so different this time? Why had I never felt such terrible anger before?" and the thoughts continued bouncing around in her mind.

She remembered herself and her sincerity if she ever spoke the words "I love you" in her past. She had meant the statement every time, it was not a casual sentence for her to just say it to someone because it felt she should, never, she had never doubted her true love when she was in love. "How come love was so strangely different this time?", she had no answer.
This love was consuming, it was distracting, it was like being mad and seeing the thrill in heights of such madness, and worse of all she was enjoying its madness incessantly. This frightened her but she would not admit to it - ever.

Standing on the edge of a very tall cliff, overlooking the ocean waves below, there is a beckoning that is not asking you to jump but to lean simply forward: forever more, and a little further out. The quest becomes wanting to watch the glory of those mesmerising ocean waves. The objective becomes being curious and to learn how tall the waves actually are. Watching then is not enough, it will transpire itself in wanting to desperately test the strength of the crashing waves against the cliffs below. Just below and ahead of where we can stand and be safe if we remain still.

"That is how we fall" she said to herself, "maybe it is for the best if we take some steps back".
Her mind was constantly spinning some new threads of thought. How could she fight the urge not to lean further into this ocean? Were her fights with him her attempts to pull them back from the edge? To save herself and to stop herself being consumed forever more she needed to find herself some distraction.

He flipped the wipers' sticker into a faster mode. The rain was so heavy by now. He hoped that this change of wipers' speed would help to clear the windscreen better, more rapidly, enough to allow him better vision of the road ahead. He was becoming gradually more and more worked up and angry with all these other drivers who despite the heavy rain were not slowing down at all.

He was being tail-gated by an idiot white van driver for the last two miles or so. The uneasiness of being stuck between a lorry in front of his car and this van behind him was making him very nervous. With such poor visibility around him,he felt it was more dangerous to remain sandwiched between these two specially on this narrow stretch of the M11 between Cambridge and London.

Eventually out of total frustration and true sense of danger threatening them, he took a chance, pulled out with all the speed that his car could offer him, he overtook the lorry. His heart was in his mouth by the time he had succeeded. He had sensed the lack of friction and complete loss of control when his tyres and the motorway's tarmac lost touch. It was over within a few short seconds. His heart was still beating very fast. He was now driving ahead of the lorry and the van, and the road in front of his headlights was clear. Without any splashes washing over his windscreens he was having a much better visibility of the road ahead. This pleased him. There was a sense of childish heroism that visited his ego at that moment. His logic however knew better, it was a foolish act that could have ended in a total disaster. He was very lucky to have got away with it .

Still recovering and putting himself together after his unsafe and dangerous manoeuvre, with a guilty and pale face he looked across at her. He was fully expecting to be told off. It unsettled him that she was not even looking at him. She just continued to stare out.

He said "I am sorry, I was really stupid back there I know, I did not mean to upset you...but I didn't know what else to do...I am not even sure if I thought it properly through, I just didn't think...I should have explained before I did anything but...sorry 'love'". He was now a bit more in shock of the possible consequences of his actions on her life too. This embarrased him and his face said it all.

After these scentenses he shut up. He continued to carefully study the road and drive while taking glances at her wanting to see if her reaction required him to say more.


She was unsure how to interpret his apology. She heard him, he sounded sincere and genuine in his apology. She did not have the heart or much desire to ask him to explain why he had managed to upset and spoiled her milonga this evening. She decided he looked guilty enough to cut him off some slack. She had decided to take some steps back and let it be.

He looked across once again, and once more quietly said "Sorry love, didn't mean to...". "I know,...let's just forget about it" she said.

He could see her gently smiling, he joined her. He switched on the music, listening to some loving tangos they were both smiling as they continued their journey.

(Milongacat is back!)

Friday, January 5

The best London Christmas Party of 2006

In my opinion the award for the best London Christmas Party of 2006 goes to The Crypt.

The grounds for the crypt to come top are many but they are worth mentioning that there were: fabulous live performance by Los Moreados Orchestra with their very varied and delightful selections of songs, plenty of delicious foods of many kinds including vegetarian, sea-food, meat, spicy, traditional English snacks as well as lovely popular selections of good cheeses, in addition to all kinds of fruits and more.

Wait there is more: to accompany and complement the good and generous food there were good & tasty bottles of both red and white wine(s). These were constantly being opened and served to anyone who wished some, and then even some more! All these were done for the guests with big smiles and warm welcoming words and gestures.

Their good hosting at the Crypt continued non-stop to the very end of the evening. It is difficult to imagine if there was some way to improve the evening further, they did it well and all.

Their effort must be mentioned here so that they hear how their guests had such a lovely and special evening at the Crypt with dining, drinking, dancing and enjoying the live music.

It was a memorable evening ,
Well done & Many Thanks!

Milongacat.