Self improvement through tango

It was one of my resolutions for this year, to learn to tango. Then I was told that it takes 10 years to learn tango. Conflicts in space-time theory aside, I signed up for a tango workshop this weekend.

The instructor was about what you might expect a world famous dancer to be like; eccentric, scattered, wild-eyed, and frequently incomprehensible. None the less, by the end of the work shop, he had most of us at least proficient enough that when an occasional tango song is played, we'll no longer have to leave the dance floor in shame. Now we can wait until after the song to leave the dance floor in shame.

If any body was watching CBS channel 5 in Phoenix last night, you might have seen me, I gave two reporters a tour of Oak Creek Canyon and the north side of the Brin's Fire yesterday. Search and Rescue was called out to man road blocks and escort residents through the restricted areas and someone was needed to accompany the journalists, so I got the assignment. Then again, the piece may not have even made it on air, there really wasn't much for them to film other than me driving them through the canyon and some smokey shots of the creek. I was under explicit orders not to let them out of the vehicle, but even if they had been able, that sector of the fire was pretty quite.

Hitting the road on Friday, first Sante Fe, then Colorado, Neraska, and Wyoming. I'll miss Flag for sure, but the horizon, she's a callin' me...

People watching

The clouds are building overhead and the band has just finished their second number, a chamber music group playing in the town square where I sit drinking my coffee and watching the myriad of people sitting, walking, playing, talking...

Actually, I'm waiting. Any minute now, the rain is going to cut loose and pour down in great sheets. Most of the people watching here with me in the square will take off scrambling for cover, but I'll sit here listening to the music (the band will keep playing of course, for the die hards in the crowd), drinking my coffee, and smiling. Because I know in a minute or so the pretty girl I met last night in this very square will come walking by and I'll wave and she'll smile and we might even dance a dance in the warm summer rain before I ask her out and get her phone number, which I was too nervous to ask for last night. Yep, any minute now...

In the mean time, there is a pack of kids running hither and thither, between cellos and speakers and piccalo players. A woman pushing a baby stroller that looks as though it was engineered by NASA as part of the Mars Rover mission stops and listens for a bit. She must be from out of town. Speaking of out of town, I saw the most Barbie-Doll looking gal I've ever laid eyes on downtown a day or so ago. Never have I seen such a thing on the streets of Flagstaff, I tell ya.

Over on the rocks transients with their faded backpacks; summer time in Flag is a popular spot on the transient circuit. And then there are the three elderly gray haired fellow that turn up at every live music venue in town. Pony Tail, who dances by himself to a rythm that only he knows, Mendocino, who fled a bad marriage in California to dance with the pretty college girls and mock the guys who refuse to dance, and Lazy Eye, who plays a mean jazz guitar every once-in-a-blue-moon.

Yep, lots to see and do and daydream in this middle size town of mine...