Camille Cusumano

No, it’s not a story about a sensual golf course . . . just a list of a few tango-related links I think are useful to any tango aficionado. There are numerous tango blogs in the ether-sphere, but I find most difficult to follow. Here are my pix:

To Tango – I can’t say enough about this site and the wealth of information it offers on tango, steps, composers, history, music, trivia, everything tango. It’s easy to navigate, too. I’m not much of a Net surfer, but I’ve spent much time at this site. Check it out, http://totango.net/ttindex.html.

TangoMango is the definitive site for details on milongas, classes, workshops, and more in many cities throughout the U.S. http://www.tangomango.org.

Batango – is the site of the Bay Area Tango Association for my home base, the San Francisco Bay Area, and lists all the milongas, classes and special events in that area. www.batango.com.

Richard Lipkin’s name is on the lips of anyone who knows anything about tango in New York. Do check out his page, eminently useful and fun to navigate. http://www.newyorktango.com/

Deby Novitz is based in Buenos Aires, where she has lived for several years  dancing and teaching tango. She operates her inn, La Casa de Deby,  in the Palermo barrio—I enjoyed a month-long stay there in December, 2006, and cover some of it in my book, Tango. Contact her for more info and check out her blog, too. www.lavidacondeby.com.

Cherie Magnus – I enjoyed watching Cherie and her partner, Reuben, dance in milongas in Buenos Aires. Cherie and Reuben teach. She keeps a blog about her life as a California expat in Buenos Aires. Enjoy her artsy, colorful site. http://tangocherie.blogspot.com/. Also, check out her story, Church of Tango, on Le Catedral, a really cool milonga, but not for everyone: http://www.the-vu.com/church_of_tango.htm

Clay Nelson is Mr. Portland Tango. I haven’t met him yet, but I know enough about Portland tangueros to know I’ll like him a lot when we do meet in October at the festival he heads up. You’ll enjoy his site.  http://www.claysdancestudio.com/

Horacio Rodriguez sent me the link to his new Web site and I list it here for the fact alone that Pugliese’s Nochero Soy serenades you throughout your visit the site. Horacio, a maestro who lives in Buenos Aires, lists interesting “opinion notes”—everything in Spanish and English—and a bit of fun travelogue on Buenos Aires. http://www.truetango.com/

A prophet is not without honor even in his own country, if I may irreverently mis-quote Matthew, Chapter 13, Verse 57. Such biblical allusions come to mind when I view the work of Portland pastel artist Michael Fisher (photo left is of his “Milonga at El Beso”; see his site for price, details). I first had the immeasurable pleasure of gazing upon his pastels in Buenos Aires. Please have a look at his gallery before I wreck things for you with words (which elude me when faced with startling artwork). It’s like a mini-tour of the city long called the “Paris of South America.” His works take you to favorite haunts, known and secret corners of Buenos Aires—el Abasto, the botanical gardens, San Telmo, Corrientes, El Beso Tango Club, and more. http://mfisherart.com/

Speaking of the City of Light, I met Michael and his wife, Thomasina, both elegant dancers, at a favorite Saturday morn haunt, the classes of Oscar and Mariana Casas in El Beso. I can’t resist alluding to Paris in the 1920s and la generation perdue when I recall the many wonderful, creative people I’ve met in their classes. Oscar is an artist himself. We enjoyed so much stimulating conversation at crowded cafe tables after class—do I dare compare his tango class to the likes of Cafe Select and les Deux Magots, Paris’s two cauldrons of intellectual and artistic ferment??? I do, I do. Je crois, donc, c’est vrai.  The artistic juice runs high among the young and the, ahem, mid-life in BA. Heck, Coppola lives there part time (as does yours truly), in the Palermo barrio, where he’s been filming  and the cafe/bookstores are prodigious. The NYT is fond of running travel stories on this phenomenon and in some ways I wish they wouldn’t let out the secret.

Which brings me to my friend Senor Kent Wade, another Portlander of noteworthy dance skills and artistic bent. He’s also handsome, as you can tell from his photo. He’s funny (humorous funny), too, and I could say more good stuff, but I believe he has a girlfriend now, so I won’t get anyone’s hopes up . . . for now. We threw the best party in town one night at his place in Barrio San Nicolas, which you can visit at his site. He’s taking applications for room-mates (see details at his site). You’ll enjoy the photos and travelogue of our beloved city at his site, too. Here’s a plug for his daughter’s yoga place, Aerin Alex O’Malley, who lives and teaches in San Francisco (my other great city). I am a huge proponent of yoga as the best discipline or cross training for tango dancers, bar none.

Jay Rabe, Portland tango teacher, is very dear to my heart—although we have met only by phone and email. First check out his site. I love that he calls tango an “obssession,” a word that I have avoided, being related to too many psychologists. But it’s true–es una obsesion. Jay’s site answers many questions people have about tango—floorcraft, history, etiquette. And I love that Jay presents and sells the workbook, The Tango of Learning Spanish written by my esteemed Spanish teacher, Demian Gawianski (who is a whiz kid schooled in English, French, Greek, Sanskrit, Portuquese). It’s a wonderful book for tango dancers, with language exercises built around tango obssession. Jay is dear to me because he so kindly offered to help me (sight unseen!) give a tango demo when I present my book, Tango, at Powell’s bookstore, October 14. Please join us. Un beso y un abrazo para Jay!

Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans has an eye for great art. The gallery represents some beautiful work, by Argentine artists, Rosario Marquardt and Roberto Behar, like this darkly humourous one of Carlitos playing with the airplane that he no doubt perished in, in Medellin, Colombia, 1935 . See more of their tango art at this link.

Chapter 22. Breathing Lessons

“If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room. -Alison Wright, travel photographer/writer.”

I’m being eaten by mosquitoes on the terrace of La Pharmacie, a restaurant in a former old drugstore on Charcas. But I wouldn’t dream of wimping out and saying, “Let’s go inside.” My thick-skinned companions, photographer Alison Wright and writer Lynn Ferrin, live in San Francisco, where fog limits outdoor supping, and they want to eat al fresco. As uncomfortable as I feel, I realize I’d probably jump in the contaminated Río de la Plata if they asked me, so I sit tight.

Alison and I know each other peripherally, mainly through Lynn, who was my boss at VIA Magazine until she retired in 1999. Alison’s stock photos have illustrated some of my travel stories. They’re hanging out with me before and after their cruise to Antarctica. Lynn had told Alison how I was down here practicing tango and Buddhism, so she sent me some emails asking what photo opportunities there might be along those lines. Since it’s unlikely my monk friends would be seen dancing tango, Alison decides to follow me, perhaps the city’s only dancing Buddhist, to my usual milonga haunts.

What an honor it will be to be shot by the same lens that captured the Dalai Lama, his head bowed, his hand gently around the rifle of a soldier who is smiling reverently back at His Holiness. This image of Alison’s, for me, captures the way arms of peace will gently silence arms that lead to mass destruction.

Alison knows a lot about Buddhism and says she would not be alive today but for her ability to focus on her breath. In January 2000, she was in Laos on her way to a meditation retreat in India when her rickety old bus was hit by another bus and shorn in two. People died. She was sitting at the point of impact. Her back was broken, her spleen diced, her lungs punctured. Her left arm looked like it went through a paper shredder. She nearly bled to death. A British aid worker drove her over washboard roads seven hours to a makeshift hospital in Thailand.
She’s convinced it was the “breathing lessons” at the core of Buddhist practice that helped her endure and survive the next three weeks of trauma and agony, including sutures with no anesthesia to her lacerated arm.

Back home in San Francisco, it took many operations to remove glass and debris from her arm and lots of rehab to reassemble her. While still in physical therapy, Alison got a notion that she had to climb 19,340-foot Mount Kilimanjaro, which she did, defying all odds, just two years after the accident and a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday.

This is what I’m thinking when I decide to let a few sharp-toothed mosquitoes gnaw on my legs all they want. It’s so great to have Alison and Lynn here, just as my milonga world is starting to seem so small and insular. Their visit is a reminder of how big the planet really is.
Few onlookers could guess the number of vertical and horizontal miles my two companions have logged on this planet. Both Lynn and Alison have climbed to Everest Base Camp, about a thousand feet lower than Kilimanjaro. They’ve been to Tibet, Nepal, down the Amazon, into the heart of Africa, and all over Asia.

After we’re done eating, Alison accompanies me to La Ideal, where I introduce her to Ángel. He invites us to sit at his “Ángel y amigas” table. She shoots plenty of photos of me and also furtively takes advantage of other ops-a pair of red sparkling shoes (Dorothy’s ruby slippers on stilts), a creaky older couple stuck together with the glue of aged love and adoration. She calls me a “hottie” in my tango getup, but she’s blond and so attractive that she has to keep fending off men who all seem to be under the impression that she can’t wait to drop her equipment for them. “Sorry, I don’t dance,” she has to tell man after man after man.

The next evening I’m late in meeting Lynn at her hotel because the rainy season has kicked in-and that means occasional power outages. As I descended from the eighth floor the power had gone out. I made it safely out of my cage, but the other coffin-size lift held captive my neighbor, Laura. I called the concierge for help before I left, but Laura later told me that she spent a good hour trapped between floors.

As Lynn and I feast on delicious sorrentinos, the Argentine version of ravioli with spicy sauce, and wine, I tell her how the elevator incident reminds me how blessed I am-finally. I’m leading the charmed life after a year from Hell, here in a perennially developing country where people constantly point their index finger to their eye and say ¡Ojo!, meaning “watch for the dangers lurking everywhere!” Lynn shares with me how she loves Buenos Aires even as she recounts how she’s been strapped with a few hundred counterfeit pesos. “I knew that change place was suspicious,” she says, laughing it off, as she describes having to walk down a long, narrow dark hall to get there. But she was in a hurry to get smaller bills for the taxi driver who had no change for her bigger notes. It’s refreshing to be in the company of a seasoned traveler who knows how to take these things in stride.

We talk about Dan a little, because Lynn has known him as long as I have. She thinks highly of him and that he and I belong together. With my newfound patience and equating the act of waiting as soul-building virtue, I tell her that may be so, but for now he’s happy with Evelyn and I’m content here. Lynn says, “I can see that.” Although she’s with a group booked for a tango show, she’d as soon come watch me in the milonga. “You’re the best act in town,” she says.
What a good girlfriend she is!

End of excerpt from Tango, an Argentine Love Story, to be published by Seal Press, October, 2008.

August 8, 2008    photography – camille cusumano

I arrived back at Mom’s on Kent Island, Maryland, yesterday, via the great, cheap DC2Ny bus (it’s got WiFi! Only $28 one way, DC to NYC), aided and abetted by the Washington Metro and my kind sister, Lisa and two nieces, Anna and Catrina.

In light of a horrific tragedy, labeled a “historic wreck,” I offer the link to a short piece I wrote on Kent Island —the oldest settlement in the state and a well-kept secret in summer especially. Had these drivers stuck in a huge traffic snarl read my article on Kent Island (above link and below), they might have suffered less.

It is a Sunday now as I write and the Highway 50/301 going over the Bay Bridge that spans the Chesapeake is a parking lot to say the least. A pall of silence fills

the air. I only learned of the terrible accident as I rode my bike over the Cross Island Trail that parallels that road in part and I could see the cars were at a standstill. How maddening that must be.

Apparently, at 4 a.m. this Sunday morning, a poultry truck (MountainAire of Delaware) drove right through the guard wall as if it were paper and went over the side of the bridge, falling about 20 to 30 feet. It landed in shallow water (10feet), killing the driver. Authorities are still investigating and cleaning up the accident. Read updates in the Washington Times.

For the sake of those drivers who missed it—psssttt! Hear ye, hear ye, read all about Kent Island. Today the weather is gorgeous—warm, sunny, not humid, fluffy cumulus clouds in blue sky (hence the proliferation of drivers heading to the beaches of Delaware and Maryland, using the only artery, the Bay Bridge).

For those of you who just don’t want to navigate away from this page, here’s the story in full:

KENT ISLAND 101

When the Going Gets Tough, Get Off Route 50
Sunday, July 9, 2006; Washington Post (read my update following this piece)

Next time you’re sweating it out in Chesapeake Bay Bridge traffic between the beach and the Beltway, ease off an exit ramp onto Kent Island, Md., to wait out the crowd. Find relief on a historic main street with antiques shops, cafe, bakery and day spa; kid-friendly activities including a scenic trail and nature center; and waterfront dining on some of Maryland’s freshest crabs. Or just ditch the whole going-home thing and spend the night.

GETTING AROUND: It’s easy to navigate Kent Island (15-by-four miles) once you jump off Highway 50 — either at Route 8 (the first exit on the east end of the BBridge) or Route 18 (next exit), both of which take you to Main Street in Stevensville, a town that prospered around the steamboat trade and still feels like the 1920s.
WHAT TO DO: At many Stevensville businesses, you can pick up a self-guided walking tour brochure to find architecture on the National Register of Historic Places, including the pretty 1880 Christ Church (117 E. Main St.), with a steep slate roof and stained-glass windows. End the tour at Happy Trails Bicycle Shop (111 Cockey Lane, 410-643-0670), where you can rent bikes for the entire family, and make your way to the nearby Cross Island Trail ; rentals from $10 an hour ($15 for tandem), including helmet, lock and trail map.

The Cross Island Trail: This paved walkway (http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/crossisland.html) runs for more than five miles through canopied forest and over wooden bridges with splendid views of the Chesapeake. Cardinals, red-winged blackbirds and red-tailed hawks chart courses in meadows; herons, egrets, geese and ducks ply the marsh grasses. Watch for white-tailed deer in Terrapin Nature Park, at the trail’s west end.

WHERE TO SHOP: At Ye Olde Church House (426 Love Point Rd., 410-643-6227), kids can watch the grazing sheep outside as you size up the shop’s restored trunks, decoy ducks and quilts. Go to the Glass Bug (325 Main St., 410-643-5021) for artsy stained-glass items, from sun catchers and kaleidoscopes to windows and lamps. Island Furniture Studio (321 Love Point Rd., 410-643-3303) sports tropical flavored furnishings that run from linens, china and carpets to tables and chairs in rattan, wicker or teak.

WHERE TO EAT: Weekends may involve a wait at the island’s dozen or so seafood restaurants, most family-friendly. Many are on Kent Narrows (Grasonville), technically separated from the island by a narrow bay channel.
At Fisherman’s Inn (3116 Main St., Grasonville, 410-827-8807), try the mussels marinara ($9) in garlic, white wine and plum tomatoes, buttermilk-dipped calamari ($8) or mouthwatering Maryland crab cakes ($22). Be sure to check out the G-scale train that chugs over 280 feet of track in the dining rooms. At Annie’s Paramount Steak & Seafood House (500 Kent Narrows Way N., Grasonville, 410-827-7103), you can dine on a deck over the narrows. Check out the winning cream of crab soup ($7) or oyster stew ($7); seafood, meat and pasta entrees run about $19 to $35. For broad views of the Chesapeake and Bay Bridge, savor cracked crab on an outdoor picnic table at Hemingway’s (357 Pier 1 Rd., Stevensville, 410-643-2722). The menu (with entrees starting at about $22) has a Caribbean flair — blackened spices, jerk-style dishes and fruit-embellished sauces.

A less expensive seafood option is Love Point Cafe (401 Love Point Rd., Stevensville, 410-604-0910), where you dine alfresco on light fare: drunken clams ($10.95), blackened ahi ($12.95) or a shellfish sampler ($14.95). Nearby, at the Peace of Cake bakery (314 Love Point Rd., 410-604-0355), find a place to sit and snack on gooey, freshly baked cinnamon rolls, muffins, fruit tarts and other rich desserts.

WHERE TO STAY: If the traffic is just that bad, consider one of several chain hotels, all in the Kent Narrows area and within walking distance of many restaurants. Most include continental breakfast, pools, fitness facilities and other amenities. These include the new Hilton Garden Inn (3206 Main St., Grasonville, 877-782-9444, http://hiltongardeninn.hilton.com/ ), where every room has a water view and private balcony and there are slips for guests who arrive by boat. Fridays and Saturdays through summer are usually booked, says the hotel’s general manager, Judy Basil-Burns, “but Sundays through Thursdays are often wide open, and the rates drop to $149 to $189 as opposed to $199 to $249 on weekends.” Availability is similar for the other area lodgings, barring late cancellations.

Pleasure boaters also drop in at the Best Western (3101 Main St., Grasonville, 800-828-3361, http://www.bestwestern.com/ ; from $115 weekdays, $190 weekends), as do duffers who love its golf course. Two other chains are within view of the abundant waterfowl and peaceful sunsets: the Holiday Inn Express (1020 Kent Narrows Rd., Grasonville, 800-465-4329, http://www.holiday-inn.com/ ; from $120 weekdays, $185 weekends) and the Sleep Inn (101 VFW Ave., Grasonville, 877-424-6423, http://www.sleepinn.com// ; from $132 Fridays-Saturdays and $99 Sundays-Thursdays).
The Chesapeake Exploration Center
DON’T MISS . . . the Chesapeake Exploration Center (Kent Narrows, 425 Piney

Narrows Rd., Chester, 410-604-2100, http://www.qac.org/ ; free), at the east end of the Cross Island Trail. Adults can enjoy the exhibits on the bay and the video of the building of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, while the kids are encouraged to rifle through drawers filled with fossils or climb up a lookout tower with views to the bay.

AVOID . . . Red Eye’s Dock Bar (Kent Narrows, 410-827-3937) on Sundays from 5 to 8 p.m. if little ones are in tow. That’s when it holds its bikini contest — and the poses are not PG-13.

– Camille Cusumano

For more information on Kent Island: Queen Anne’s County Office of Tourism, 888-400- 7787, http://www.discoverqueenannes.com.

UPDATED CHANGES: Island Furniture is gone from Main Street, but has moved to another locale in Stevensville. In its place is My Little Studio – antique-stuff,

objets d’art; Love Point Cafe is gone  but the Rustico Cafe and Wine Bar looks interesting—Mom says she liked her meal there; and sadly, the biked rental shop is gone, but in its place is Rebecca’s Corner, another artsty, tchotchke, antique-y shop. Finally, the restaurants are all still great, but let me put in special mention for both Annie’s and the Fisherman’s Inn’s rockfish (or sea bass)—you may not believe me, but I like it better than lobster. But then, I also prefer Delighting in Dungeness to blue crabs, go figure.

Also new is the Jetty in Kent Narrows, near the Fisherman’s Inn. What a hoot! The photos show the colors—lime green, orange and yellow palm trees, a sandy beach on which to sit at tables over the water. Food is not gourmet but pretty good—seafood. Wine list leaves a lot to be desired (in fact, it’s downright lousy), but there are cocktails and lots of beer.

The Jetty, above, has “beach” front seating and many Dayglo palm trees.

Below: 1. Lisa, me, Catrina, Mom, Anna

2. Catrina being mischievous

3. Waitress in turquoise under orange palm

August 5, 2008

May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!
—from the Metta Sutta

A couple of years ago at the tango club La Nacional in lower Manhattan, I met a man, whom I’ll call Kevin. I don’t recall his name for certain, but he was blond and looks like a Kevin in my memory bank. He was from Neptune, New Jersey, a shore point, and I’m a native of the state, with many kinfolk still there, so this was like instant insider info.

It came to pass that Kevin and I had taken the class offered before the milonga at La Nacional and he was the only leader who could do the pattern being taught. He was also humble and congenial. He was free of the higher-than-thou attitude of those men who are drawn to the dance because their social skills are lacking (really it is a painful self-absorption that makes them appear haughty, so I pity more than begrudge them). You come up against the charms of someone like Kevin who dances beautifully and who is unabashedly nice and you are willing to put up with anything in the sometimes Mean Streets of the Milonga.

After the class when the milonga started and while the floor was still wide open, I was, in my own self-absorbed way, confident that Kevin would invite me to dance asap. But when I looked to him with the let’s dance look, and a subtext that said since we know what we’re doing, he demurred. “Later.” He gently explained, “I devote the first hour of milongas to dancing with beginners.”

The earth stood still and I lowered my gaze. The heavens opened up and angels’ trumpets backed up the bandoneons of the tango music playing. Behold, before me, a true bodhisattva—one of those enlightened beings who volunteer to stay behind and help others reach liberation before they will enter Nirvana.

His kindness and selflessness were rare in the milonga. Instead of scaring away newbies, which happens frequently, he was treating them with compassion. Not with the haughtiness of those jaded ones who think they have the steps down and you will make them look bad if you don’t match their level.

I wanted to be like Kevin, someone who loves the dance and his fellow dancers “whether they are weak or strong, omitting none.” I thought how his generous act pays itself forward and backward. It benefits all beings. The fragile beginners will gain confidence and stay around and the milongas will get healthier all around. And, the world is a better place, because as my late great father used to say, “You can’t NOT smile when you dance.”

Kindness. It sounds like something that should be as ubiquitous as the seashell fragments under my feet here at the Jersey Shore where I am for the summer. But it’s not.

I came across a book called The Power of Kindness by Piero Ferrucci (read this great review). At first I thought, What? Do we need a thick volume to tell us about what seems self evident and instinctual? Of course, we don’t. It’s just that these days kindness (especially here at the crowded shore) seems to be such a diversion from the usual Mean Streets of everywhere you go—on land, sea, and in the air. It is rare enough to actually be a form of entertainment. A random act of kindness makes the earth stand still and heaven open up.

LovingKindness (yes, one word) is the theme of the Metta Sutta, the Buddhist sutra, or scripture, that the peacefully resisting monks in Myanmar chant these mean days as the military beats, tortures, and kills their numbers. It is a sutra frequently chanted by Zen and Vipassana students. Sylvia Boorstein one of the most emulated dharma teachers (at Spirit Rock, Fairfax, CA), says the Metta Sutta is her favorite and she takes it everywhere she goes. That’s good enough for me. But I must confess that the first time I heard of such a thing, at the San Francisco Zen Center, I thought it was corny and ligthweight—to chant about loving kindness.

Until I really needed it.

It was the very sutra I desperately took refuge in, (along with tango itself) memorizing it, when my tango obsession led to complications . . . and then  toxic hatred . . . and then and then . . . (all covered in my book, Tango-–a love story with a happy ending.)

After all was said and done (some of which I would have un-done, un-said), I no longer think it’s corny to tout kindness in the milonga, on land, sea, or in the air. Au contraire. Its value can’t be overstated. Interestingly, I can’t recall if I did later dance with Kevin, but his shining example still looms large in my memory.

It’s easy for me to be kind when I step into the music because I’m always happy and centered dancing—a gift from both of my parents. When I’m not dancing, I often say just this one little line of the Metta Sutta to myself: May all beings be at ease. Not “happy” but “at ease.” I like this translation’s slightly ironic echo of the military call, because often that is all we need, to relax our militant, stiff and over-flexed muscles—due to constant adrenalin calling us to flight or fight. In tango that is always the case, that the dance happens when your muscles are free of willfulness of meanness, free of militancy, of self-absorption. And it follows that we’re naturally kind, open-hearted, compassionate, happy. And really, really good dancers.

Here is the Metta Sutta in full. There are other translations. I like this one. If some phrases sound awkward, remember that it harkens back some 2,500 years.

This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech.
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied.
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm, and wise and skillful,
Not proud and demanding in nature.
Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!

Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.
This is said to be the sublime abiding.
By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.