Camille Cusumano

Los Angeles Times – Alaska in winter

Winter fun warms up visitors
A spirited bachelor auction — combined with sublime scenery — helps December travelers chill out during a sojourn to the 49th state.

By Camille Cusumano, Special to The Times

Anchorage - Last December I stood on the deck of a lodge in Talkeetna, Alaska, and watched sunrise bleed down the snowy crown of 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley. I had seen our nation’s loftiest peak before, rising dramatically from the flat tundra but always shrouded in cloud. This view was rare and awesome, as the sunrise was in concert with the full moon. I snapped away, joined by a man who exclaimed, “I live here, and I never get to see McKinley like that.”

Appeared in the December 2006 issue of dancenotes

Yoga’s secret ingredient for partner dancers
By Camille Cusumano

If you’ve ever felt that dancing tango requires the stamina of a martial artist, then you’re ready for Carmen Iglesias. A yoga teacher and tango dancer, Carmen has developed a program that supports the special demands of Argentine tango—and, in essence, of all partner dancing.
All partner dances require that the leader and follower carry their own weight, but tango requires even more fluidity, a nearly “liquid balance.” Both partners must be like water seeking its own level, ever-ready to shift gracefully within the improvisational patterns that define the dance.

Original article here.

On a nine-day cruise across the Atlantic, swinging to the Big Band sound of Tommy Dorsey was a breeze—especially for women traveling alone.

By Camille Cusumano (photo, Kent Wade)

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, I chanted with the women of my generation, a strident slogan meant to crumble crusty patriarchal assumptions. But this past spring in New York, I boarded Holland America’s SS Rotterdamand checked that conviction at the port. I was stepping into an earlier era, an age of innocence in which very little was equivocal, from the legitimacy of a war to which sex asks the other to dance. I embraced the quaint notion that I needed a man.