Notes from the Front, mid-June:
....Leaving 1924 with a hard-core long-time milonguera, I said to her, "the 1924 Paradox remains intact! Guys who refuse to dance with me elsewhere were lining up to ask me here! —But this probably never happens to you." "Oh, it happens to me too, it happens to everybody. It's not perfect," she said. Then she tacked on, "there's someone who dances with you whom I have been waiting for YEARS to ask me to dance, and he's never asked. It's not perfect."
She's right, you know. One night months ago I was blissfully dancing with Julio and even though the joy of dancing with him is that you always feel like you get the Whole Julio, on that night, in the middle of an ordinary camino, I felt—I can't explain it, it was like some veil slipped aside and suddenly I was seeing even more of his emotional self than usual. It was just a fleeting glimpse but when he parcelled me back to my chair he was all serious and even though he used to ask me every milonga, from that night on he's never asked me again, never never. This is a great loss. It's not perfect.
On the other hand, I've just added a new high card to my hand. I've wanted to dance with The Turkish Guy since the dawn of tango time. The internal monologue always went, "there's that guy, one day when I'm a big girl he's going to dance with me And He Will Love It." The day came! It was an awesome first tanda. I am happy to have new good dance chemistry out there. But part of why it took this long to finally happen is because we're never in the same place. It's not perfect.
From my Bureau of It's Just A Helpful Image, I've stumbled on a cool new way of thinking. Usually "core" means my psoas, cranio-sacral nerve connections, spine, pelvic muscles, etc., but today I was noticing how my transversus abdominus and internal and external obliques felt like they were hands, holding in my deeper core muscles and the muscles that led to my legs. And if they were hands, then surely I could *use* them like hands. I could hold on to things tighter—and there was that sharp twist in an ocho that Gabriel calls "juicing the orange." I could let go of things—and there was sending the legs. I could do a lot more than just "let go" of things though: I could toss them, or throw them, or let them slip from my grasp, or lay them down like sleeping babies. Sure enough, different muscular releases led to different qualities of legs going. I could also recollect things back into my "hands"—and there was a controlled collecting that kept the body part being collected available for instant change.
Good times! On the other hand I'm still not getting that simple back walk into a molinete to flow. It will happen one day in the future when I'm thinking about something else. It's not perfect.
—Then, after a couple days of thinking about how not-perfect everything is.... My son gave me a bunch of flowers. He said, "I just love you so much! See? I proved it with flowers!" And let me tell you something about that not-perfect everything:
It's ALL perfect.