No lessons required

My sister Linda and I were regular viewers of American Bandstand, a television program of teenagers dancing to the rock ‘n’ roll tunes we heard on the radio. American Bandstand with its host Dick Clark was on five days a week after school beginning August 1957-1963, our preteen years. We listened to rock ‘n’ roll music on WLS-Chicago radio with Dick Biondi. We bought 45 rpm records of our favorites. We practiced dancing at home with the kitchen doorknob and each other. We aspired to dance like the teens on American Bandstand. There weren’t any dance classes for teenagers who wanted to dance to rock ‘n’ roll music. Teenagers just watched television and copied what they saw or their friends showed them how. We danced to the tunes we heard on the radio. It was our music growing up in the 1950s and 60s. My sister and I knew how to dance when we got to high school and attended Friday night sock hops. The problem was that the boys didn’t dance.

 

Teenagers on American Bandstand who have a nice embrace for tango

Dancing in Buenos Aires was entirely a different matter where teenagers were concerned. Tango was practically the only music on the radio in Buenos Aires during the 1940s and 1950s. Most families didn’t have a television in Buenos Aires until the 1960s, if at all. Boys wanted to meet girls, so the social activity of choice was dancing. Boys had family as role models at parties where dance and music were always present. They went to a neighborhood club to see others dancing. There weren’t any organized classes, so the boys in the neighborhood gathered on a street corner and learned from each other. Some practiced together until they were ready to dance with partners. Girls were escorted by an older relative to learn by dancing with the boys at a neighborhood club. They sat accompanied by their mothers or aunts at tables around the perimeter of the floor waiting for the boys standing in the center to invite them to dance. They learned tango and vals by dancing. No lessons required. The young men weren’t allowed to enter the downtown confiterias until they were 18, but that didn’t stop many from going with a relative or friend who had instructed them on the codes and introduced them to friends. As soon as they owned their first suit with long pants, they were ready to enter a confiteria where they observed for a year or two before dancing publicly. Then once they tasted the nightlife of downtown Buenos Aires they became regular inhabitants of the confiterias and cabarets lining the streets of downtown Buenos Aires. There they perfected their individual styles dancing to recordings of their favorite orchestras. A few of these men who danced in the 1940s and 50s are still dancing today. They are the milongueros—self-taught dancers who can dance well with any woman with musicality and elegance.

Tags: Milongueros, tango