And fortunately for people like me, there is social tango.  Everyone says that the tango changes your life, and my story is no exception. Here's the short version of how I became a tangophile.

I have an extensive musical background, always liked what little I knew of tango music, had seen snippets of tango in film, but was never a dancer until quite late in life.  I struggled with tap lessons for a number of years in the interests of preserving bone density and cardiovascular fitness, but did nothing with a partner.  One of my few memories of dancing with my late husband Keith Crandell was a summer evening in 1974 in East Hampton after our housemates had returned to Manhattan when we played Solace, a Scott Joplin piano solo that occurs in the soundtrack of The Sting. When Keith died, in 2005, I enlisted his musician brother Richard Crandell and our friend Jean Zipser, a wonderful dancer with balletic training, to perform Solace at Keith's memorial. Richard played the piano for Jean, who crammed Argentine tango lessons for weeks and danced solo the woman's part of what is normally a dance for two.  She, whose ballroom lessons had ended abruptly in adolescence because of family difficulties, became obsessively hooked on ballroom and tango.  Six months later, hurrying to a lesson with her teacher to train for a teacher-student tango competition, her car hit black ice on a hilly curve.  She was killed instantly. Tango lyrics, as you might expect, are mostly about love and the many forms its losses take -- the equivalent of country-western songs for us, as someone has observed. It took me quite awhile to feel that it might be my turn to try to step over my emotional losses and to attempt to learn the tango. I finally began lessons seven years ago this month, and was fortunate to fall in with a number of superb teachers and congenial classmates, first at the now-closed Sandra Cameron School of Dance near the loft and later at the Dardo Galletto Studio in midtown.

Once we gain basic skills, and master the basic three types of music commonly played in social settings  -- tango, vals and milonga, a heavy-footed, syncopated dance that owes more to Africa and the Caribbean than to Europe, we usually begin going out to milongas, as social tango parties are called. I bought lots of recorded music, practiced at home and began my years frequenting bars, restaurants and multiple dance schools, honing my skills, learning the repertoire and becoming acquainted with other members of the Manhattan tango community.