TANGO TANGO

SHOW ME a poster bearing the entwined silhouettes of two angular dancers accompanied by the words "Tango", "Sultry sensuous passion" and "Direct from Argentina" and the outcome is fairly inevitable. As a veteran endorser of the brilliant, erotic film-noire Naked Tango and long-term contemplator of taking tango lessons, I naturally took myself off to the Sadlers Wells theatre in the hope of seeing this most infamous and ludicrous of passionate dances in its raw, pre-ballroom state.
'Tango Para Dos' turned out to be a series of stories told through the medium of - though not in the spirit of - tango. The linking theme was not passion. The underlying aggression latent in some of the cameos did not simmer but, well, just sort of lay there. The worst were those scenes which misguidedly set out to amuse, and which generally involved director Miguel Angel Zotto grinning inanely at the audience in the tradition of the most loathsome of mime artists.
The second half kicked off on a slightly more hopeful note. A proud woman enters, slowly sags as she removes her finery and finally lies abject on the ground. Enter an elegantly dressed couple, who dance over and around her, seeming not to notice her prostrate form. She rises between them and succeeds in drawing away some of the man's attention, and then has a try at the woman. What follows is a pull between the two women in which the man is contested over like an object and seems to have no say in the matter. Unsuccessful, the sad lady returns to her prostrate pose. Couple exit, unchanged.
There is a scene where men dance with each other: this is traditional, a ritual courtship display dance executed to attract women. The style of dancing is consequently different, competitive, demonstrating the play between strength and elegance, control and aggression. For this potentially powerful scene, Zotto regrettably bottled out and paired each man with a woman dressed as a man. Why??
Yeah, the overall production was slick and professional as befits the West End stage, but there was nothing to indicate that these performers were making their UK debut fresh from Argentina. Look, what we wanted was knife-fights, bodice-tearing, face-slapping, flaring nostrils, murder, lust, rejection, revenge, debauchery, like your average night at a rural dance hall when big Tom and the Mainliners are playing. Passion is all the more intense and extreme when channelled first through restraint and control, until it becomes unbearable and compelled to burst forth. In this production, it never quite broke free.

HOLY NIPPLE-CLAMPS (1)
Congratulations to Derek Cohen, organiser of SM Gays, as mentioned in my Pride article a couple of Hot Presses ago. In recognition of his achievements in helping to educate, inform and liberate SM men, hehas been canonised by the all-male order of nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (of whom you shall be hearing more). The Sisters, whose own mission to inform on safe sex and encourage a guilt-free approach to individual sexuality is well known, dubbed him St Derek of Human Bondage when they got their way into one of the group's monthly information meetings.

DINOAPATHY
If you think you're going to hear a single word from me about Jurassic Park, you are sadly deluded. It's been bloody dinosaurs for the last month already. In the newsagent, the supermarket, the street markets, the museums and extinct though they may be, there's no getting away from the blasted things. Well, all my sources say that the brilliant effects are totally unhampered by a complicated storyline, so it might be necessary to check it out. Eventually. When it's less hip.

KRAY DAY, KRAY DAY
With the Kray twins' 60th birthday coming up, East End entrepreneur Laurie O'Leary is out to make a killing of his own. He is taking bookings now for two coach tours of the former Kray empire on the weekend of October 23rd and 24th, taking in such sights as Violet and Charlie Kray's house, the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel where Ron shot George Cornell, and "blonde Carol's flat" where Reg knifed Jack 'the Hat' McVitie to death.
The man's credentials are impeccable: as a childhood friend of the terrible twins and manager in the swingin' sixties of one of their clubs, Esmerelda's Barn, no-one's going to call him a sham and a poof and get away with it. Meanwhile, the cream of British entertainers, including Barbara Windsor, will be amongst 250 invited guests at a party in honour of the twins hosted by the recently-formed Krays Supporters Club.
My local paper, the East London Advertiser, bears a typically nostalgic reference to the lads who were ever so good to their mum and kept the bad 'uns off the streets. Referring to the above coach tours, the editor suggests a fleet of shiny black 30-year-old limos would be more in keeping before going on to say: "Who knows, the sight of them snaking through the streets of East London might stir a few memories. Even better, it might even keep a few muggers off the streets."
He's got a point: sightings of the Filth are few and far between in this neck of the woods compared to my earlier Hampstead residence where you couldn't make your way to the offie without being good-eveninged by at least three matching pairs of plod.

HOLY NIPPLE-CLAMPS (2)
Is Dublin now set to become the gay capital of Europe? Are we finally going to see a reversal of the trend which brought gay Irish men by their scores to the Big Smoke in search of gayer times? As it stands, all gay lonely hearts ads in the UK have to bear a mandatory bracketed clause declaring that potential respondents must be over 21. It's bizarre really. Surely heterosexuals under the age of 21 face potentially more dire repercussions from their canoodling capers, like unwanted pregnancies, for example?
The change to the Irish sex laws seems to have had some kind of a knock-on effect in the UK division of Roman Catholic Enterprises Inc. Top Brit Cath Cardinal Basil Hume came out, if you'll pardon the expression, and stated: "People who know themselves to be homosexual must not for that reason develop a sense of guilt or think of themselves as unpleasing to God. On the contrary, they are precious in the eyes of God." Whether he meant it as in "Oooh, we are precious, aren't we?" or not, I do not know.
The Cardinal recently flitted over to St Anne's in Bethnal Green to crown a spanking new BVM as part of St Anne's day celebrations. Sitting next to him at the ceremony was Fr Christopher Bedford, a C of E cleric who has gained notoriety for threatening to join the competition if the ordination of women priests goes ahead. Evidently, it's OK to worship them if they're dead but not OK to credit them with any spiritual merit whilst they're still alive.
Queer old world, isn't it?