I sent this letter to the Portland List Server......
Hi Everybody,
The Media is definitely a double-edged sword. The Willamette Week wrote an article about a class that I am teaching and also my new little studio. It is nice to get some free advertising but the article is filled with inaccuracies and misquotes. To start with it shows a picture with a label that this is my partner(?) Maggie. As most people know that is Lara (not Maggie) and my partner is JP. Oh Well.
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The Little House Of The Little Black Sheep |
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| BY JOHANNA DROUBAY |
| jdroubay at wweek.com |
In love and in tango, Nola Gray swings both ways.
(sigh, Accurate but tacky.)
"I'm obsessed with dancing lead, and I'm obsessed with dancing follow," says the bisexual, bi-directional dancer.
(misquote, I said that I love dancing lead and I love dancing follow. I do not use the word obsessed since it implies a mental unhealthiness to dancing.)
"I'm one of the few people who can look around a dance floor and say, 'I've danced with every single person here.'"
(I did say this.)
Always the outsider,
(I do not feel like an outsider in the Tango scene, in Portland, in my other activities. In fact, I feel very much at home here in Portland.)
Boston-born Gray
(This is deceiving. This implies that I am a new-comer here. I have not lived in Boston since I was a child. I have been in Portland for 7 years and before that I lived in Northampton MA for 10 years.)
just celebrated the opening of her new Northeast Portland studio,
(La Casita is in Southeast)
La Casita Ovejita Negra—the Little House of the Little Black Sheep. Last Monday night, she shared her passion for tangling tango's conventional roles at the first in a series of tango classes crafted specially for gays and lesbians.
(This class is open to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Straight-Ally, those who like to Lead or Follow, Friends, Curious People….basically almost everybody!)
In spite of Portland's reputation as a GLBT-friendly city, few formal dance classes for same-sex couples exist. Aside from the gay-friendly square-dancing and roller-skating antics of the Rosetown Ramblers, same-sex dance has been relegated to smoky bars and clubs.
(Not true, Out Dancing, for ballroom dancing, has been going strong for years.)
Call this the Portland dance community's real coming-out party.
(er.)
Inviting same-sex couples to tackle tango signals more than progress. The spirit of Gray's class returns tango to its roots. Flash back to turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. Argentina's economy was booming, riding high on the mass export of leather, beef and grain. Out-of-work Italian men set sail for the city in droves to become Argentine cowboys. The mass influx of testosterone left a disproportionately small number of women to meet the cowboys' manly needs. "So you'd have 100 guys waiting in line for one whore," says Gray.
(I did state this history)
"Some people say that tango originated in these lines of lustful guys. There's certainly a violence to this dance that's reminiscent of a knife fight between two men."
(This I did not say and I find quite disturbing. Especially the ‘there’s certainly a violence to this dance’ which is false and gives an inaccurate view of tango. What I did say is that in Tango’s early roots this might have been an influence along with Candombe and other African and Cuban rhythms.)
Artistry, not just activism, drove Gray to initiate a tango class in which men could follow and women could wear the fedora, so to speak: "For those who are deeply interested in the art of tango, role-changing is fascinating. I know of one straight man in Portland who had high heels made for him so he could know what it's like to follow."
(This I did say.)
And in a city famous for its thriving population of black sheep, she expects to be welcomed with open arms. "Ovejita negra is a term of endearment," Gray explains. "It means the beloved black sheep. The ovejita negra pushes the limits of its community while still remaining a part of it."
(Well….close enough.)
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If anyone has any funny stories about being mis-quoted please send them to me. (sigh)
Embrazos,
Nola