presents

Sally Ride

Astronaut Sally Ride in NASA uniform in front of bank of switches in the Space Shuttle
Sally Ride (1951-2012) USA Astronaut
“I wish that there had been another woman on my flight. I wish that two of us had gone up together. I think it would have been a lot easier.”
~Sally Ride

In 1983, Sally Ride was the first USA woman in space. From a TED-Ed presentation of a 1983 interview with Gloria Steinem.

Tango is a dance of connections, with the music, with our partner, with the other dancers, even with the spectators. As a teacher, life for me keeps making connections to tango — and vice-versa.

There is something different about woman to woman (as well as man to man) connections and relating. Not necessarily better but often easier for being “in your channel.” In the origins of our tango in Argentina and Uruguay, where man-man and woman-woman instruction was the norm due to the wide disparity of numbers of men and women (possibly as much as 50 to 1!), there was a native, even if inadvertent, wisdom to same sex learning.

With the goal of becoming good enough to earn dances with members of the opposite sex, the process was to train with your own sex, learning first to follow, then to lead.

Process leads to goals

At Tango Tribe, with our process of training everyone from the start to both follow and to lead as the way to become fully capable dancers, we make necessity a virtue with any gender or role-preference class imbalance. All our classes will include any combination of men and women leading and following. In future articles we’ll talk more about the many benefits of learning to both lead and follow from the first.

Do you fear learning to dance, let alone learning both roles? Well that brings us to two other Sally Ride quotes.
“All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.”
But with a process of well planned training,
“We were able to overcome being overcomed.”

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