My big day of flirtations

This weekend I had my first date in Oregon. It was underwhelming. At least I got out and met someone! The date was a fix up - actually my realtor's son. His eyes reminded me of a pale-eyed boarder collie - a ghostly gray-blue with one slightly darker than the other. They always seemed very cold and harsh to me. Other than that he seemed quite concerned about showing he wasn't a geek but managed to convince me quite thoroughly that he was!

In the same evening I went dancing with a postdoc to a place that specializes in Argentine Tango. The couple featured under the "events" part of the webpage are young professional tango dancers and were great to watch.

http://www.tangocenter.org/

That was my first time dancing non-ballroom style tango. The two dances are in fact very different. Here is the most noticeable difference as described in wikipedia:

"A striking difference between Argentine tango and ballroom tango is in the shape and feel of the embrace. Ballroom technique dictates that partners arch their upper bodies away from each other, while maintaining contact at the hip, in an offset frame.In Argentine tango, it is nearly the opposite: the dancers' chests are closer to each other than are their hips, and often there is contact at about the level of the sternums (the contact point differing, depending on the height of the leader and the closeness of the embrace). In close embrace, the sternums of both the leader and the follower are in complete contact and they are dancing cheek to cheek (or in the case of a larger height difference chin to forehead)."

In addition to the frame, the dance feels very different. It is much smoother, slower, and more improvisational than ballroom tango. The male lead is very strong but also very subtle. You follow the male because his body is moving a certain way, not because he has given you a cue with the arms. The arms really do nothing. In fact before the social dancing began there was an hour of free lessons - I was lucky to be there when they had a very well known instructor as a guest. And for almost the entire hour we were dancing without using our arms - so the entire lead was just by feeling the man's chest against yours.

The actual dancing felt very different based on who I was dancing with. Making an analogy between dancing and sex is very played out - but it very much was like that. With some people it was like sex - fun, efficient, a bit demanding, while with others it was like making love, where the person was not only giving me subtle cues to respond to but also adjusting his movements based on how I responded. With some people it was like bad sex - with toes in the wrong places, and a lack of ability to communicate (via body language) about which leg goes where...

I'm glad I gave it a try, and I hope to go back again! Maybe next time I'll be slightly less awkward? Probably not though!