Alain Delon and the Mr. Men

Alain Delon!!!

Man Yung grew up watching Alain Delon's movies whenever they played in Hong Kong back in the 50's, 60's and 70's.

If you think that people were crazy going to watch "Dirty Dancing" four or five times - well, watching every Alain Delon film four or five times in a row was merely normal for Man Yung. "Plein Soleil", "Borsalino", "Le Samourai", "Rocco e i suoi fratelli", "Le Cercle Rouge", "Scorpio" etc. etc. - you name it, Man Yung has not only watched it, he could give me a detailed account of the plot with an accurate description of what Alain Delon was wearing in the movie thirty years after!

Right now, Man Yung has got me hooked on Alain Delon movies too. Great movies, great actor, impeccable style and class, impossibly handsome - who can dispute that Alain Delon is the real deal? If you add the combined ages of Man Yung and myself together, you will get a number that is darn pretty close to 100, but that alone would not stop us from squealing like pre-teenage schoolgirls at a Wham!* concert whenever we think of how dreamy Alain Delon is.

Alain Delon!!! with oh, some clingy woman** (I don't blame her)
in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse

While Man Yung's formative years were heavily influenced by Alain Delon, I, on the other hand, grew up with the Mr. Men:

Roger Hargreaves' the Mr. Men

I had the Mr. Men Board Games (Mr. Men Dominoes were the apex of fun - I played these with my grown-up twenty-something uncles on our trip to Scotland until we nearly missed the train) and the Mr. Men Stationery Pack, but I only had two of the Mr. Men books - the stories of Mr. Bump and Mr. Small. I spent the rest of my short English childhood feeling deprived and wishing that by some magic happenstance someone would send me a care package of the complete set of Mr. Men books. Because to a five year old, the Mr. Men were way cute:

Take your pick....

Well, all good things have to come to an end - the Mr. Men didn't seem so hot anymore when one reaches the ripe old age of six.

The great mystery is this: Why then, do we have grown women in Tango still salivating and fighting tooth-and-nail over the various Mr. Men that they encounter at the milongas?

The last time we checked:

Mr. Bump, despite being a true floor hazard, always has his pick of young chicas to dance with. His best buddies Mr. Rush, Mr. Topsy-Turvy, Mr. Dizzy and Mr. Clumsy have quite a following too.

In a case of the blind leading the blind, Mr. Daydream dances with with his eyes closed, with lovely swooning partners - who also have their eyes closed.

Mr. Uppity, Mr. Mean and Mr. Fussy doesn't dance with just anyone that doesn't belong in the same class (or clique) as them. They are afraid that ordinary tangueras will find them too amazing. Their general sour uppity-ness doesn't stop most tangueras from lusting over their "manly" embraces - indeed, rejection from these Tangueros is a mandatory "rite of passage" for all Tangueras.

Mr. Silly, Mr. Funny, Mr. Nonsense and Mr. Wrong are so hilarious, they should get together and form their own stand-up comedy troupe. But instead they are formulating their graduate thesis on Tango and its relationship with Far-Eastern Philosophies and wowing the chicas on the dance floor with their ingenuity and "deep thoughts". If they take it even further they can be Mr. Clever, who has given up his lucrative high-paying day job to be a Tango teacher and is now putting his M.B.A./J.D./Ph.D. and advanced marketing skills to good use attracting the masses to his pricey, long-winded but utterly useless Tango workshops. Oh, and did I mention that the chicas love to dance with him?

Mr. Messy may look and dress like a temporary Toronto garbage dump - but he is a special favourite with the ladies because he is from Argentina and teaches tango.

Mr. Greedy's big paunch (Or is it Poncho? I can never tell the difference) makes him just as popular as, or even more popular than the average Milonguero when it comes to dancing Tango.

And last but not least, Mr. Tickle's long twisty arms can be found in every corner of every milonga - grabbing all sorts of asses. I don't know how he can find enough spare limb to lead the women he is dancing with with all that grabbing.

Oh, Tango's worthy Mr. Men - you are lucky that Alain Delon doesn't dance Tango. Because if someone with real good looks and real talent and real class like him danced Tango, there won't be a single Tanguera left on the dance floor - they will be all too busy drooling over him.

Meanwhile Man Yung and I will be busy ogling Alain Delon riding a motorcycle here:

Alain Delon!!! and Dalida - "Parole Parole"

* If you know what I'm talking about when I say "Wham!" then you are no spring chicken either.

** I'm just kidding - the lovely lady is Monica Vitti - pretty dreamy in her own right!

Es Facil!!!

One of the weirdest things I remember is my mother "not-teaching" me how to knit.

"Well," you say skeptically, "I've heard about people teaching people how to knit. How can you 'not-teach' someone to knit?"

Once, in my youth, I said I wanted to learn how to knit, and my mother grudgingly agreed to teach me - but only after many lectures on how difficult it is to learn how knit, how much patience it would take (I guess I didn't have any), and how impossible it would be for me to understand the many factors that go into the making of a knitted garment that was passed onto her through generations and generations of ancestral knowledge. It was also severely stressed to me that I simply did not have the right combination of DNA to embark on such a complicated, dexterous, lady-like activity such as knitting - apparently all the robust and hefty women on my father's side of the family were more suited to farming, ditch-digging and hog-wrestling than delicate craftwork). Given all these difficulties, my mother made it clear that teaching me how to knit will take a lot of effort and time and probably shave off a couple of years off her young life - and I better be grateful.

"Hey Mom! Hog Wrestling takes skill too!"

All that nagging and we hadn't even started. Finally she got out the yarn and the knitting needles. My mother cast on the stitches. Then she knit a couple of rows to show me how to make knit stitches. I tried one or two stitches - but they weren't to her satisfaction so she unravelled them and knit them again. I tried a few more - not perfect, and therefore not satisfactory, and so forth. Even when my knitting was "passable", I was not allowed to knit to the end of the row, or to purl on the wrong side - my mother took care of all of that. Why bother to explain to me how to do it and let me try? I wouldn't "get it" anyway.

So the whole bizarre experience had me knitting a few stiches on every other row, and my mother frowning and cursing and knitting all the rest. I came out of the experience with absolutely no clue as to what I was doing.

My mother had effectively "not-taught" me how to knit.

Can you blame me for dropping the needles and not picking them up again until a good two decades later? And when I finally did, I got myself a "Knitting for Dummies" book out of the library, spent about half an hour figuring out how to cast on - and within weeks I made a sweater!

OK, that sweater was knitted top to bottom completely "wrong" - I twisted every single stitch I was supposed to knit - but the important thing was that I did it all myself. I simply learned by doing, without being held back by nagging doubt or disparaging voices of doom.

And guess what? I found that knitting is EASY. There was absolutely no basis for any belief that I was "fiber-craft challenged".

After this life-lesson, I found that a lot of other things were easy if I put my mind to it (without shortening anybody's life). But with my kind of childhood (you can only imagine) occasionally I can slip up and start wallowing down The Memory Lane of the Pits of Despair in the Slough of Despond.

Tango for instance. How many times have I looked at some dancer, teacher, performer executing some seemingly impossibly skillful elegant move and said "I'll never be able to do that!!!" All too often. And there are dancers and teachers out there who will smirk and tell you precisely that you would never be able to do what they can do. That is, unless you take plenty of private classes with them - because they hold the secret to all of Tango-verse and you will never, ever get it unless you shell out the big bucks, perhaps even sell...your...soul.

When we first began learning Tango, there was a very dedicated middle-aged lady who was "not-taught" Tango by a local teacher. Every week she would pay $100 for one hour of private class, and her teacher will proceed to criticize every aspect of her posture and dance until she was bathed in a cold sweat and too terrified to even move.

She was dancing just ok when we first got to know her - she could follow a bit. But after paying all that money to the local teacher and all that working over in a year of private classes, she was so embroiled in the nightmare of her own inadequacies she couldn't dance at all. No-one wanted to dance with her, not even the worst leaders, because she would be so paralytically unresponsive. She soon dropped out of sight.

How refreshing it was then for us to encounter wonderful teachers like Martha and Manolo. Whenever we would say that something they were teaching us was "difficult", they would tell us no, not at all. Emphatically, they would say - "Es facil!!!". Yes, learning Tango is (and should be) Easy.

When they taught, they really taught. And if we didn't "get it", they encouraged us to try, try, try again. They never made it seem like learning Tango was some big mystery. Just practice, repeat the moves, let your body get accustomed to what you are doing - and you'll eventually get it. And if we were still encountering difficulties, they'd steer us back on the right path with a simple explanation.

In our experience, the best Tango teachers won't be spending half the class talking and sprouting incomprehensible mumble-jumble about Tango history/philosophy/spirituality, and the other half of the class criticizing and belittling every move you make until you are paralyzed with fear. Whenever you encounter any teacher using such methods to step on you and elevate themselves to some kind of "private-class worthy" pedestal - beware.

Man Yung was never too impressed with the naysayers. His favourite saying: "They have two arms and two legs, I have two arms and two legs - what's the big deal?" It's a good thing to keep this in mind and also this little tip from Martha and Manolo - "Es Facil!!!" Don't let anyone tell you anything different.

A blog message for Anne of SheEweKnits

The following is a message for Ms. Anne Featonby of SheEweKnits, master knitter and proprietor of "SheEweKnits", a webstore selling traditional Shetland yarn based in Milton, Ontario. I wanted to let her know that I finally finished knitting the sweater from the yarn that I bought from her - but alas, her old email address does not work anymore. Luckily she has a blog - I'm leaving a comment for her on her blog so that she can check out the message I have for her here. For our other dear readers: Treat this as a little update on what I've been up to - other than tango!


Dear Anne,

I'm not sure if you remember me, because the last time we spoke was at least 5 years ago - it's Irene from Toronto who was knitting the Alice Starmore "Mary Tudor"!

Well, I FINALLY got it finished just two weeks ago - and guess what, I graduated with an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Toronto just days before finishing the sweater. I'm posting photos of the finished sweater here, so that you wouldn't ever need to wonder "Whatever happened to that Mary Tudor yarn kit that I sold in 2004?" Well, it took me five long years - but both the degree and the sweater are completed! It seemed like yesterday that I was buying the yarn kit from you and telling you that I was going back to school to do my M.A.

Studying for my M.A. part-time while working full-time during the day (I'm not sure if you remember, but I'm also a practicing lawyer) was tough. All the spare time I had in the evenings (and on lunch breaks during work!) would be devoted to studying for my courses. But I guess since I eventually finished the sweater I never really stopped knitting.... I was just knitting really, really, really, excruciatingly, slowly.

Meanwhile we have also been dancing the Argentine Tango a lot during these five years, so much so I've learned Spanish and we've traveled down to Buenos Aires three times already. Man Yung is quite a pro now! We also started writing this blog about all the things we've encountered through Tango - and we've met some truly wonderful people through Tango, and had some amazing (and sometimes absurd) experiences.

I've also picked up the needles again (or perhaps I've never dropped them) and started on a very simple vest for Man Yung. If you can believe it, he complains that all the fancy fair-isles and arans I've made him aren't warm enough, so I'm just knitting with a chunky yarn on a tight gauge to see if this would be better. One day I would like to knit a fisherman's gansey - but who knows, if the courses I'm planning on taking starting September at the U of T School of Continuing Studies are too demanding, it may take me another five years to produce the next sweater!

By the way I looked for your old website and couldn't find it. I found your blog instead and I'm sorry to hear that you are considering shutting SheEweKnits down. Without SheEweKnits it wouldn't have been possible for me to knit some of the most stunning fairisle sweaters ever. No matter what your decision, I just want to say again thank you for all your kind advice and support and the wonderful Shetland yarn and patterns you brought to Canada through your store.

We will continue to follow your blog for your latest news! Please give all our best to your family (and to the ever lovely Daisy), and have a lovely summer,

Irene (and Man Yung)