The Playground Tango

the midmonth post

We’d been taking ballroom dance for half a year or so. They taught a different dance each month: rhumba, cha cha, waltz, foxtrot, west coast swing. Maybe it goes without saying that it was really fun. And it was around the six-month mark that we got to the tango.

As was usual in the class, we started by learning the steps without music, and then the teachers would use a few different songs throughout the rest of the class. And one of the songs they played that week was the tango song.

You know the one. DUM dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da. DUM dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da. I looked it up later and it’s called La Cumparsita. If you think of any music when you think of tango, it’s almost certainly this song you are thinking of.

So I was talking with Bill on the bus on the way home and I was, a bit sheepishly, admitting that almost my entire mental association with the tango—other than a few sultry scenes in movies over the years—comes from childhood memories of the playground.

Maybe around the third grade, it was a common game at recess for girls to grab one another and pretend to tango across the blacktop. Arms out stiff, facing in one direction, chanting the song “DUM dum dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da!” then a quick pivot to face in the other direction, including switching which arms were thrust out (something you’d never do in the actual dance) and march off in the other direction “DUM dum dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da!” Back and forth we’d go.

And Bill said, “Oh yeah! We totally did that too. And there was also the idea of the rose between the teeth.” Oh, yes, the rose! Yes, I agreed. Now, here’s the thing: I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bill grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. This was in the early 1980s, long before we had the internet to transmit memes into the brains of children nationwide.

How, and why, were Gen X kids pretending to do the tango on the playground on both coasts? This knowledge feels, in my brain, like all the jump-rope rhymes and handclapping games I picked up from the ether around the same age and still know to this day. Just childhood folklore that was transmitted unavoidably into my brain and the collective brains of all of my peers. But jump-rope rhymes make sense as a thing for school children to know and do. A fake tango categorically does not. What’s the deal?

So we started researching. The first lead we turned up was that there was a real and serious revival of tango going on in Argentina in the 1980s, where it had just been made legal again after having been outlawed for many years by the repressive junta. This led to it spreading in popularity through South America and eventually to the US as well. But, as cool as that sounds, I’m pretty sure it did not immediately reach a bunch of little school kids in the USA. We’d have had no real way of seeing or hearing about it.

Because it pretty much had to be TV right? What else was there for our generation? And we wouldn’t have seen the new exciting real Argentinian tango revival on the TV we were watching. But even knowing we were looking for some TV thing, finding the relevant TV references took some digging.

What you have to remember is that, as kids, we weren’t only watching current television. We watched so many reruns. I don’t know if they just weren’t making enough TV programs to fill all the hours in the day yet, or if they simply didn’t make enough programs for children specifically. But, whatever the reason, watching syndicated reruns of shows from twenty or thirty years before was a totally normal part of the viewing habits of 80s children (as you will of course recall, if you were one), even though this fact does now seem odd in retrospect.

But that’s where we found it. In a Tom and Jerry cartoon from 1956, Tom and a dancing bear do the tango to La Cumparsita. And in a famous I Love Lucy bit from 1957, Ricky tries to tango with Lucy while, for whatever reason, her blouse is full of eggs (which of course inevitably all break in the denouement)—the music, naturally, is La Cumparsita. In a 1964 episode of the the Addams Family, Gomez teaches Lurch to do the tango—at one point Gomez has rose between his teeth and they even do the switching-arms-back-and-forth thing.

There’s not a doubt in my mind that all three of these shows were being watched by large swathes of kids my age growing up in 1980s. And so this idea of tango-as-comedy, which apparently originally belonged to comedy writers of the 1950s and 1960s (the origins of which I haven’t uncovered but which I’m sure involved more than a little cultural prejudice), got passed down. And we picked it up the same way we were picking up so many other bits and bobs of cultural literacy, much of it inaccurate (ideas about quicksand and germanic opera divas and manifest destiny).

The thing that’s funny about this one, though, is that it’s also ironic. Not in the say-one-thing-and-mean-the-opposite sense, exactly, or the Alanis Morrissette rain-on-your-wedding day sense (which, I know, I know, is not really ironic, but we know the sort of situational “the firehouse burned down” irony she was trying to convey). But in the way the Oxford English Dictionary describes thus:

“In 20th-cent. criticism the application of irony has expanded to encompass non-verbal expression in fields such as art and music where it denotes a distancing from and playful engagement with what has come before.”

A distancing from and playful engagement with what has come before. I think it’s fair to say that the midcentury comedy writers were mocking the tango. But we as little kids couldn’t know that. We had never seen and weren’t engaging with the real tango at all. We were engaging with the only tango-related cultural products we had seen: the 50s and 60s cartoons and black-and-white sitcoms. And we were engaging with them playfully. While at the same time distancing ourselves from them so fully that it took me a week of digging to find my way back.

Many years ago, when anyone talked about Gen X at all—back when we were young enough to be worrisome—we were often described as a generation defined by irony. There was a fair amount of hand-wringing over our sarcasm, our cynicism, our disinclination to take things seriously. As if we were a whole generation of Ethan Hawkes and Winona Ryders, tossing our floppy hair around and rolling our eyes and smoking cigarettes, forever on the verge of saying something snarky that revealed the depth of our disengagement.

I found this exasperating and nonsensical at the time. But now I wonder. If a whole generation of kids were doing the Ironic Playground Tango before we reached the double digits, maybe there was something in it after all. Maybe our capacity to ironically deconstruct culture was baked into our brains all along. And maybe that was something for an earlier generation to feel intimidated by.

Or maybe that song is just really, really catchy.

---

It’s not too late! If you want to join the Bay Area Book Club, go ahead and do it and I’ll forward you the email you’ve missed with this month’s (very short) book selection (plus extras)!