[Tango-L] Fun with a Milonga-Candombera

[Huck Kennedy]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 7:25 AM, Tango-L and Tango-A Administrator
<tango-L-owner at mit.edu> Shahrukh wrote:
>
> So it is true that having posted a video implicitly saying, "Look at me,
> am I not great?" one must be prepared to accept that some would respond
> disagreeing (and those are the ones more likely to respond). However,
> the tone of the following response (by a poster who is normally a good
> contributor, including later postings on the same thread) was
> unfortunate as it was designed to ridicule rather than be a constructive
> review:
>
>> Deer lowered, he waves
>> his left arm around more than a drunk partygoer doing the chicken
>> dance at a wedding reception.

     Two bads on my part contributed to this:  First, I was replying
to someone else who had commented on the video, and was working on an
erroneous assumption (of my own making) that a third party had found
the video on the internet and posted it (which is the usual case on
Tango-L), rather than the actual dancer himself.  That's my fault for
just plain old not paying enough attention to attribution details, and
I apologize for that.

     And secondly, having spent the first 20 years of my life in the
NYC area, I'm prone to outrageous hyperbole.  When we say, for
example, "it cost us an arm and a leg," we don't really mean it
literally.  While most of the time that hyperbole and other types of
humor add to the charm of a posting, by now I should know that
everyone doesn't have the same upbringing, and doesn't necessarily
share the same sense of humor, and that if I'm not careful it can come
across as a bit insensitive at times to people who grew up elsewhere
in the US, and even more so to non-US readers like Sergio.

      Oh well, perhaps we can take this lemon and make lemonade out of
it:  The next time we're dancing and we notice our left arm taking on
a life of its own, we can say to ourselves:  "Arm?  Excuse me, arm?
The bride hasn't even thrown the bouquet yet, and already you're doing
the chicken dance!"

Huck