mad hot ballroom; Enamored of the dazzling dresses, the exquisite shoes, and the promise of beautifully toned legs, Gaby Wood discovers what it really takes to tango.(Column)

In one's fantasy, one has a certain flair for the thing one wants to learn. And so I had high hopes when I set out last fall to learn to tango, something I had wanted to do for years and that I now fully expected to transform my exercise-free self into a lithe, superfit dancing sensation-preferably overnight.

I had accumulated a number of tango cliches-beautiful outstretched legs beneath swirling red dresses, killer Rita Hayworth-style shoes-and I gathered that I was not alone in my fantasy. Madonna, Baz Luhrmann, and Julie Taymor had used tango to stand in for sexual freedom in their movies, and there is the insane popularity of Dancing with the Stars. How could one not be seduced by a dance that is both languid and ravenous, informal and precise, with moments of such sweetness and intimacy?

On the advice of a choreographer friend who wrote and coproduced Dirty Dancing, I call the Sandra Cameron Dance Center in lower Manhattan, which has been training dancers and Hollywood stars for 25 years. This is the first dance studio in New York to offer classes in Argentine tango; it is taught by professional tango dancers recruited from Buenos Aires and by the program's coordinator, Jeni Breen.

I am reliably told that Jeni, who worked as a dancer and choreographer for many years, teaches basic tango best, and I start by taking private lessons, building up to three times a week, with her. Faced with a real live dancer, I realize that expecting her to teach me to tango in a matter of months is bordering on the offensive: Would I ask the same of a ballerina? Jeni puts it beautifully-the tango, like a language, has a vocabulary, she says; what she will teach me is "conversational tango," enough for me to get by at any tango dance party from New York to Buenos Aires. As for my developing a dancer's body, Jeni warns, I shouldn't expect to see immediate results, but my legs certainly will become stronger and my alignment will improve.

As soon as we begin, I am stunned by my own stiffness and by how unaware I am of what my body is doing. All Jeni asks me to do is walk backward, yet every move I make is too big, too clumsy, too crooked. I begin to wonder what kind of idiot would try to learn something new in her mid-30s.

I am inspired, however, by something Jeni says. She tells me that you could listen to the same piece of music hundreds of times and never dance to it the same way, which makes me see that although you can't pretend to tango-there is a proper vocabulary to it-it is a magically open-ended or, in Jeni's phrase, "unruly" dance. She mentions that one of their teachers, Carlos de Chey, is a "surprising" and "witty" tanguero. I like the idea of wit being expressed this way and want to learn enough of the language to get the joke.

By my second lesson, things already feel better. I am still anxious and fail to keep in mind all the things that are supposed to be second nature-flexed knees, balance tipped toward the front of my foot, shoulders mirroring my partner's (Jeni's)-but I have learned some steps that feel like tango steps: cruzadas (crosses) and ochos (figures-of-eight) forward and back. There is one called el dibujo (the drawing), which highlights the way in which all of these steps were originally devised, in the rough barrios outside Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century, for women in long skirts to make patterns in the dirt and be ...