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Salsa Characters
More salsa characters:
The Bulldozer
This is the guy who will knock you into every single couple in your dancing radius. Forgetting that leading is also spotting for the little top in heels that you are spinning left and right, Bulldozers will charge you through the dance floor without any control or regard for those around you. Identify them quick and early on in a dance ladies, so you know to tighten your steps and focus on what’s around you. The dance will probably be lame because you won’t be free, but your objective in dancing with a Bulldozer is to finish the dance in one piece to move on to a Fred-Astaire. Bulldozers are cousins of Topsy-Turveys (keep reading).
Columbo
Salsa dancing is very much like wearing a mask over our every day lives. When we hit the dance floor, we are simply salseras and salseros. Sometimes though we wear evidence of our outside lives that our partners pick up on during a dance that make a person go, hmmmm…. The worn hands: hardened with callouses, dirt under the fingernails not from neglect but from labor, the scratches and scars. And the muscular arms that go with them. The t-shirt from a company or product. And sometimes it’s the work clothes and equipment you bring to the class or a social discarded in the corner. It brings out the Columbo in you, so we’ll call the salsera/os that inspire this Columbo. Some things are better left unasked. Enjoy the dance.
Shy-But-Why
These are the dancers who are diamonds in the rough. They have a salsa soul but doubt their Jedi powers. They come as leads and followers. If you spot one, it is your duty to guide them to the dance floor and help them overcome the cloud over their salsa brilliance.
Ghosts of Past: Salsa Characters – continue reading …
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Laid Off
The brothel responsible for Nova’s 2 hour “occupation-by-circumstance” seems to have closed. Discoteca Help, the club C-mixto insisted we visit as a “dance institution of Latin America” has closed shop, to the delight of some and heartbreak of others. Ladies- if your man takes you to Brazil and says he wants to visit a popular disco while the cab driver insists that it’s not the place to go with your lady while flashing you nervous eyes from the rear-view mirror, then chances are you are going to a sex-tourism spot. In Discoteca Help’s instance, you are going to a disco-brothel. Nova managed to make a career and genre for herself within minutes as the “anything goes” variety due to her, gasp!, willingness to dance together with a man and let him rest his hand on her forbidden shoulder. C-mixto could not convince the bouncer we were a couple and I was scolded for not following the proper protocol. Cio, Discoteca Help. Thanks for the memories.
Fire Hydrant Series
Tearful Hydrant, Washington Heights, NYC March 2010
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Non-urban Odyssey Winter Olympics Observations
- Olympic Observation on Curling: Curlers must be experts in masturbation. All you do is repetitively jerk a broom back and forth with immense concentration! I mean some of them even look like they have PJ bottoms on. Check out Norway’s pants.
- Bobsledding is Nascar driving on ice.
- Ice-skating: Most skaters either look like they are skating with their partner (pairs), skating to the music (ice-dancing) or skating by themselves (individual). Kim Yu-Na, female Gold Medalist, skates as if the ice is her partner. Most elegant skaters look like performers showing off their stuff. I get goose bumps seeing Yu-Na because she skates as if the ice is her lover, the audience is simply there as a silent witness. Truly the queen.
- Speed skating short track is great. Roller derby on ice.
- People should back off from trying to make Snow-boarders into suits. Telling them how to act, what to do, blah blah. They are what they are, that’s their sport!
- Basically, the Winter Olympics is great for anyone who likes fast sports.What makes it funny is that some of these guys look like couch potatoes, unlike the physique of the summer Olympians.
What are some urban Olympic Sports that we can add?
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Tis the Season for Scum Bombs
Those urbanites who have subways and elevated train stations know the gross factor that cometh with melting snow. It’s the slowly dripping, murky droplets of liquid substances that drop onto your head (or life-ending incidents of landing in your eye) from the beams and ceilings of an aging rail system. Unlike the drops that fall with rain, these scum bombs are highly concentrated with grossness: the filth of the subway and all that hath accumulated in the old snow. What are they made of? Who knows? Human feces, dirt, rodent excrement, spit, toxic waste….? Survival tactics: Avoid the wet spots you see on the floor. They are usually the ground zero of falling globs. Tread like Indian Jones in a Peruvian ancient temple to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
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Central Park as a Galápagos Island
Part of Urban Confessions Week
Like it or not, some New Yorkers treat Central Park like a Galápagos Island. It’s either a free pet store or an orphanage. We’ve racked up a dog, iguana and parakeet from its forests, all with the thrill of catching them with our own hands. How many of you will fess up to taking your Woolworth’s goldfish to a local pond to either to spare it the spin down the toilet bowl, or because you imagined that it would have a better life there? Keep it up and we’ll spawn some new weird urban species.
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The crack in your coffee
Part of Urban Confessions Week
Alright, this confession comes from a barista/cook/waiter/owner all in one type of worker behind the
counter of a Greek diner. It’s SCANDALOUS, I say, for a Greek or Greek diner coffee lover. Now I truly believe the magic behind the Greek diner coffee is the temperature. See my Cecil-ware conversations about this. But on two separate occasions at two different diners, I heard a fellow addict ask the Greek magician if he used “the Greek coffee”, as she sipped her black elixir with a smile. He nodded, and then mumbled, “Venizelos…” Venizelos, is it you in there?! How is that possible, you are the dark demi-tasse kind. Perhaps the diners are using this as a “secret sauce”, a variant of a potion I am convinced a certain donut chain uses to make their coffee taste so darn good. Or is the coffee in some of these places exclusively brewed from Venizelos beans? If any of you try to make a cup of joe with Venizelos from a drip machine and not a briki, let us know how it tastes. We’re close to unraveling the code of the king of urban coffee.
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Another man shares my bed
Part of Urban Confessions Week
…These are not the words you’d expect from someone married, partnered or involved… but it’s true! C-mixto finds me in bed with him every night like clockwork. He has come to recognize his voice when the covers block out his face, and rolls his eyes when he realizes that I am in bed with Craig Ferguson. Craig Ferguson! How I’ve developed quite an appetite to stay up late and watch you! How can it be avoided? You are truly a gifted comedian from what I see from your show, and the philosophic words of your theme song have convinced me that “tomorrow is” truly my “future yesterday” so I might as well stay up and be entertained.
You are one of the few celebrities I’ve actually taken an interest in learning more about, even buying your memoir (which sort of provoked this series, because I feel a little shame in this). It is probably your ability to keep my attention and evoke a sincere laugh from me that has spawned this regular habit of watching you. Your performance is fluid, jokes are spared the staleness often inherited from rehearsals. You are truly a one-man-act.
I have to say (does this constitute a double confession, one now to you?)… lately I have been watching your shows online the day after it airs at a time more convenient for me. It’s fun, but, sigh… not the same as the intimacy of sneaking off with you at 12:35am while others are asleep.
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Out with it. I dance on 2!
Part of Urban Confessions Week
Those in the confessional:
Nova is making a guilt-free declaration: She dances “on-two”, mambo style and makes no apologies. No, dears, it isn’t snobbery, I’m not part of the gang taking salsa away from its Nuyorican streets and “legitimizing” it in ballrooms with white academics. Dancing “on two” is a practice of cultural preservation of a distinct style of salsa dancing. It fits me like a glove, fills me with a joy of living, and does the same for others too. And practicing a certain form of salsa dancing sort of makes it an exciting hobby.
Does being an on2 dancer make it harder to spontaneously go out and be able to express your adopted art form? Sure… so you try to learn to manage to celebrate salsa’s other forms. But in your heart you ache… you can’t become one with that second explosive beat that drums along with your heart.
And for all you non-counters out there that think the passion of music is lost in numbers… it can be said that numbers are the fabric of everything- we forget or don’t realize this because numbers speak in different languages. And, as JPLogan so astutely pointed out to me one salsa night, the biggest counters are the ones making salsa itself: the musicians! Does this mean you need to go out and buy an abacus to bring along with you to the dance floor? No… after awhile the numbers are dressed differently, sort of like when you stop “translating” a foreign language slowly in your head after you have a fundamental command of it.
So take those salsa shoes out of the closet, get to Iguana, a social, whatever floats your boat and when the music starts, if you’re a lady, step out with the right on one, a man, break back with the left. Doesn’t that feel good?
For more about this, visit: salsanewyork.com
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A week of Urban Confessions
This week, we’ll spend some time on confessions of urbanity. So if you didn’t make it to church, skipped a meditation session, or rather befriend the abstract concept of the internet as human intimacy, park your words here. I’m reading someone’s memoir, can’t recall I’ve read that genre before, and the New Yorker just covered the whole concept of “memoir writing” and “confession” so the mood strikes me. Don’t be crying your heart out or scribe anything that you should be telling a lawyer. I’m talking about benign indulgences, dislikes, transgressions- things that others might find shocking but for you are normal. Play around with it.
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