Strap On Your Tango Shoes

My taste in music is varied, to say the least. I'll pretty much listen to anything and everything. My brother Steve is very similar, but he experiences waves of interest. He'll like a certain kind of music or artist for several months, and then it will be replaced with something almost completely different. He's gone from Mozart to the Spice Girls to Shania Twain to Diana Krall to Linkin Park to Bond to Stars, from what I can recall. I'm sure there were other flavours in between. Lately, he has developed a taste for tango music. So he asked me if I wanted to join him to see a band called Narcotango, who was playing at a place downtown last night. I said okay.

We got to the venue (a former church, it would seem) a little late, so there were no seats available. We went upstairs and surveyed the scene. The stage was set up where I suppose the altar would have been, and there was a bar in the back. The balcony wrapped around the perimeter, so we had a pretty good view of the dance floor below. There was a DJ spinning some interesting tango music, and people started dancing.

Being a girl, the first thing I noticed was the shoes. All of the ladies had similar looking shoes: high heeled, closed toe, with straps across the middle. Some of the designs were a little different, and although most of them were black, there were some white pairs and even red. These ladies came prepared to dance.

Then there was the dancing. It was fascinating watching these people move. Their legs kept weaving back and forth. A few times there were couples who almost collided, but otherwise everyone continuously moved chaotically around the floor with no problems. There was a boy who was trying to cross the room, and it was like watching a game of Frogger.

The demographics were all over the map, people from all ages and ethnicities. The combinations ranged from professional-looking couples with the women in flowy dresses, to casually dressed couples, to a pair of ladies dancing together, to a single woman twirling around by herself. Every couple was moving to a different rhythm and tempo, despite the fact that they were all listening to the same music. It looked really fun, although I wasn't about to try since I was with Steve and I have no idea how to tango. Plus I'm not entirely sure that I can handle that level of coordination.

"Now I've had the time of my life, no I've never felt this way before"