Free Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home by Maria Finn

thrust her bust forward and her butt out, giving herthe semblance of a pigeon. A dapper old man in a black wool vest with a pocket watch asked her to dance.
    “Well, this is it, guys,” Allen said. “Our new social crowd.” We all nodded, smiles spreading across our faces. Then Allen and I embraced, close but still keeping a distance between our stiff bodies. Barely daring to breath, we joined the dancers circling across the floor. We moved into the basic, terrified but dancing, more or less.
    Close embrace dancing is also known as salon style. The steps are small and subtle, and couples stay joined together as much as possible. It’s said that this form evolved from crowded milongas in Buenos Aires. If you took big steps or made wide turns on your ochos, you could bang ankles or slam into one another. So couples clutched each other and moved in tight circles around the dance floor. After Allen and I had made it through a few tandas, we stood around at the snack table in a side room, pouring wine into plastic cups. Potato chips, popcorn, and crudités had been set out by the event organizer. A photograph of the great singer Carlos Gardel was pinned over the table of uninspired snacks. This all seemed a gesture to make the milonga less pastiche and more authentic, more Buenos Aires. But, actually, tango has long been part of New York City culture.
    The craze sweeping Europe hit the United States in 1913. Tango was so popular in New York that theater owners found their tickets sales lagging. Managers started incorporating tango into the shows and hosting dances during intermissions. People preferred tango to dining, and in order for cafés and restaurantsto make money, they invented the “cocktail,” selling drinks during the dances and stretching out predinner activities.
    “The Girl of To-Day,” as coined by a
New York Times
writer, was described this way: “Her gowns, her tango teas, her votes for women, her wild exultation in the so-called freedom — all have had an influence upon her. And out of this, or in spite of it, has come a new American type.” Many of these “girls” were also suffragists. During this time, Margaret Sanger was teaching women about birth control and Anthony Comstock was nipping at her heels with his Society for the Suppression of Vice.
    Leaders of the temperance movement fought for women’s right to vote in order to aid their battle against liquor consumption. They figured that if women voted, they would all be against legal alcohol. But when it came to dancing, suffragists and preachers were not allies. The Reverend G. L. Morrill, pastor of The People’s Church, preached, “The tango is popular because it is depraved.” And then, not mincing words, he added that it is the “dance of death” and “its step in time slides to hell.”
    Another advocate of prohibition of alcohol also railed against the dance craze. In a sermon delivered at Calvary Baptist Church in 1920, Dr. John Roach Straton warned: “The plea that these dancing masters make that they desire to ‘purify the dance’ and make it safe, is idle and entirely beside the mark. You cannot make a rattlesnake respectable and reliable. The only thing to do with a rattlesnake is to chop off its head, and the only thing to do with the entire dancing mania, which has done more to corrupt the morals of this age than any other single force, is to destroy it, root and branch.”
    Dancing not only encouraged women’s independence, but it also connected high society to new colonies and developing countries throughout the world. In self-defense, British dancers debated the origins of tango to distance themselves from the “primitive.” By studying postures of figures on vases and statues in museums, they determined that the stances and moves of tango came from Greco-Roman times. In fact, they announced, tango was once a war dance of the Ancient Thebans. They knew it came from Argentina but were certain that it couldn’t have