Mambo Italiana

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

On Tuesday mornings, I go to a dance fitness class for older people at a community center on Minnetonka Boulevard. I thought I was signing up for zumba and gave myself a figurative pat on the back. “This is hot stuff,” I thought. “ Everyone will be impressed that at my age I’m doing zumba.” I still don’t know what it is, but apparently it’s not what I do on Tuesday mornings.

What I do is Cuban cha cha and Dominican bachata with an occasional Brazilian samba thrown in. I’ve never been to any of those places, but I’ve been to West 83rd Street, so I know what Afro-Caribbean music sounds like, and it flows in my bloodstream even if the blood itself is more sluggish than it used to be. My blood is, in fact, called upon to show up at the lab for testing at regular intervals. It keeps its appointments, but reluctantly. I get the feeling my blood would prefer to be out on the dance floor.

The first few times I tried out the moves, I couldn’t remember anything about the right foot stepping forward or the left foot stepping back, let alone the turn. At 80, learning dance routines is a cognitive challenge. The steps aren’t intrinsically difficult to execute but muscle memory does not serve. My feet are recalcitrant. And it all happens so fast.

After maybe ten classes, during which I felt clumsy, hopeless, possibly in the early stages of dementia, I got the message. It’s not about the steps, it’s about the music. The teacher tries to find songs that are fast enough to release the potential for joy this music carries around with it like corn kernels waiting to pop, but not so fast that we are all gasping for air.

I’m partial to Bette Midler’s “Mambo Italiana.” Just the fact that this song exists reminds me of the racy cocktail of Jewish, Italian, Afro-Latino culture on the street in New York in the ‘50s and brings an enormous smile to my face. All of a sudden, I’m dancing like the music is blasting out of a transistor radio on a fire escape outside a bodega on Columbus Avenue, and we’re young and sexy again. It’s all in the hips.

I like the fact that we dance without partners, by ourselves, for ourselves. On rare occasions, a man will wander in, but mainly this is a room full of seasoned women who are allowing themselves the pleasure of getting into their own bodies. Truth be told, I never really learned how to dance with a partner. Something in me resists the whole leader/follower thing.

The rock and roll that came a decade and a half after the cha cha was always an exercise in narcissism. Even with someone opposite, more often than not another girl, I was always preoccupied with my own outrage, my own abandon. But this dancing, this barrio, this Little Havana has the advantage of a fixed structure and a repetitive rhythm that delivers me. It’s a blueprint. Tito Puente is already in the room just waiting for me join him.

I don’t have to make it up as I go along. Latin dance occupies a sweet spot between the horror of the rec hall at summer camp, waiting for some scrawny twelve-year-old Bobby or Mikey to ask me, and the raucous freeform mayhem that followed once the plug was pulled by the Stones. I can wake up feeling grouchy, but the music doesn’t take no for an answer. It is irresistible and will release those endorphins even if I put up a show of resistance.

I still don’t know how the Latinas do it in high heels. I’m an old lady in loose-fitting pants and tennis shoes, but after the first few bars, I’m channelling Rita Moreno and Chita Rivera. I have red lips and long eyelashes, dangly earrings and a tight skirt. This might be the closest I’ve ever come to inhabiting the girl nature that I’ve always held at arm’s length.

There’s no time for gender politics once the first few bars of Oye Como Va have dropped. I don’t think about it. I don’t think about men on street corners making noises at me. I don’t think about the fear. I just inhabit the joy.