Strictly ballroom

Rob Price

Peer through the windows of my livingroom some evening, and you're likely to see a startling sight: Me, pirouetting around a coffee table while music plays in the background.

The music is a song called "Por una Cabeza." It's a tango composed in 1935 and meaning, loosely translated, "by a head." The lyrics concern an individual with an unfortunate fondness for the horse track. But no one ever listens to the lyrics anymore. "Por una Cabeza" is generally performed by a small string orchestra with an accordion player. No one tries singing.

If you saw the movie "Scent of a Woman," you may recall "Por Una Cabeza." It's the music that accompanies the famous tango scene, in which the lead character, a blind, retired U. S. Army colonel, escorts a beautiful young woman onto the dance floor of a New York hotel and proceeds to lead her through her first tango.

The music is slow and seductive. The dancers at first are tentative, then move more comfortably in each others' arms. By the end of the song, the blind colonel is spinning his partner around the dance floor in perfect time. His physical infirmity has been no impediment to the metaphoric seduction; it's even consistent with a basic tango rule: the dancers shouldn't look at each other.

The colonel's name is Frank Slade, and he bears a remarkable resemblance to the actor Al Pacino. In fact, he IS Al Pacino, a fact my wife noted when I told her I wanted to learn how to tango. "You just want to dance like Al Pacino," she said.

"Yes," I agreed. "But I want to dance like Al Pacino with you."

The reason I want to dance with my wife like Al Pacino is the fact we are coming to a major turning point in our lives. For the past 18 years, we have shared the great dance floor of our marriage with our daughter, who is wonderful in every way, of course, but also a constant presence, a slight distraction and a growing force of nature that spins us constantly in her orbit. Even if we had known how to tango, it would have been difficult with her in the room.

Now the clock is ticking on her departure for the world beyond home, commonly known as "college." We are in the final weeks of the application/ admission process, a trial that started about a year ago. The reamaining details will sort themselves out during the next few weeks, and my wife and I are already bracing ourselves for the moment in mid- August when we drop our daughter off at the school of her choice, whatever that may be.

We both know we will continue to talk about her, to speculate, to occasionally agonize. The difference will be her absence from the dinner table, or livingroom, or the couch that faces the television where only recently we all watched Al Pacino dance his tango in "Scent of a Woman."

It may have been providential the movie was playing that particular evening. Maybe it was just a fortunate coincidence. In any event, I 've been savoring the tango scene on Youtube several time a day since my wife and daughter and I watched the movie together.

Then earlier this week, an idea slowly took shape in my brain, and I downloaded "Por una CVabeza" onto my iPod and googled "how to tango" on the internet. It turns out there are numerous websites that provide detailed instruction on the tango, and they all say the dance that looks quite difficult is actually based on a few simple steps. Keep it simple, the websites advise, then begin building.

"Why don't we both learn to tango?" I asked my wife last night. "I'm sure we could find a ballroom dance class around here."

We aren't even strangers to ballroom dancing. About 15 years ago, my wife's brother got married in an wedding party in Boston that included an orchestra and ballroom dancing. We took ballroom dancing classes before the big blast and enjoyed the experience.

But that was just a lark. Now we're wondering what we're going to do with each other after our daughter - our grand project of the last 18 years - leaves home.

I think I have the answer. We will learn how to tango.

Our efforts will be tentative at first, off balance and clumsy. We'll even step on each other's toes. We'll keep at it, though, and soon we'll be spinning each other into a new adventure.