Marina Palmer has the kind of courage that is hard to imagine. Even a tango aficionado like me can scarcely conceive of the bravery required to abandon a well-paid Manhattan marketing job, an apartment walking distance from New York City's high-end shops and restaurants—for a student's life dancing tango in Buenos Aires.
At 31, Marina Palmer did just that. She became enganchado (hooked) on Argentine Tango during a vacation trip to Buenos Aires. On her return to Manhattan, she found her life had changed forever. Productivity and attention at her job were sacrificed to late nights of dancing at New York City venues. Her usually-lively conversations became focused on the dance, and friends began to edge away from inviting her to dine. Her criteria for dating came to include "must dance Argentine Tango," then further changed to "must dance Argentine Tango well."
After several increasingly frustrating years, a chance comment by her therapist, (What would you do if money weren't a concern?) led Palmer to a breakthrough. Life would be much simpler if she could concentrate on tango. From there, it wasn't a long step to convincing her father (The way I see it, the next couple of years are an MBA equivalent...) and her mother (You wait and see: I am going to make you the most beautiful grandchildren...) to provide a stipend for her studies.
And she was off to Buenos Aires.
Kiss & Tango is Palmer's excellent journal of her self-creation as a professional tango dancer. The book is structured like a tango dance, beginning with the Abrazo (embrace), and continuing into the Sacada (a displacement figure, also a "woman out of her mind"), the Gancho (a hooking movement of the leg, root of enganchado), and the Colgada (something like a dip, also "a girl who has been 'stood up' by her partner").
The book's title is a clear indication of Palmer's main theme: She went to Buenos Aires seeking not only a career dancing tango, but the "perfect partner" to dance it with.
As we stood there, waiting for the music to start, I planned the next five years of our life together. Guillermo and I would become partner-lovers immediately, thus fulfilling my dream of reconciling tango with romance once and for all. He would move in with me and within a year or two... we would travel the world, teaching sold-out workshops during the day and performing in Una Noche de Tango by night. None of this, however, would interfere with our starting a family... It would be just perfect.Continued on the next page Page 1 — Page 2
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Article comments
1 - Ashok K. Banker
Hey Pat,
Nicely danced...um, written, review. Should call you Dances With Words!
2 - Neil Liveakos
Neil's Book Review of Marina Palmer's "Kiss & Tango"
I liked the web site.
I liked the dust jacket cover photo and the photo of the author.
I liked the fact that Marina was half Greek.
I liked the fact that she had the courage to follow her dream even though it was subsidized by her parents.
I liked the fact that she had the discipline to write a book during her year in Buenos Aires.
I liked the fact that all names and occasional details were changed to protect the privacy of the individuals, especially regarding the size of the men's penises.
I agreed with her lover Ezequiel when he said that she should keep her knees together and when he concluded that she was a whore despite the pain that she felt in her heart with that breakup.
I felt sorry for Marina's Mother. But I felt especially sorry for her Father.
I posted the Amazon link to Marina's book on my blog but that was before I had read her book. After I read it, I took the link down and posted Cherie's review below.
In fairness to the reader, the title should have been "Sex & Tango" or "The True Confessions of a Tango Slut."
My conclusions are:
1. Sex sells.
2. I need more sex in my blog
3. I need more sex.
3 - DrPat
I found it interesting that Palmer needed to rediscover the death of tango upon having sex with nearly every tango partner she danced with.
In fact, I thought this was more of a literary gimmick than an actual truth -- a sort of recreation of the essential angst at the heart of tango.