Postcard from New York

Tango Gridlock: The last tango may have been in Paris, but the next is decidedly in New York, where the smouldering, slow-stepping Argentine dance has come to its feet with a shout after a few decades of sloppy disco entropy. Foreign visitors who glide into New York's steamy tango ballrooms, eager to try out their sultry stares and mirror-shined dress pumps on neophyte Americans, apparently found out about the New York revival of the courtly old dance via the not-so-courtly new Internet, and now they can be spotted plying their art on every parquet-floored surface that comes to foot, from opulent SoHo restaurants such as Novecento, to the cosy downtown tango salons, where seamed-stockinged women demurely nibble cake that has been brought to them by men who devote a significant part of their week to moustache maintenance.

Watching a milonguero (dancer of a happier, less dramatic sort of tango), hand above the hip of a woman who twists like a Fellini siren, guiding her in a dance that begins like a walk and proceeds like a hunt, it emerges that the tango is a ritual of courtship, and that it belongs to the parlours of a politer, yet more lubricous era. The man, not the woman, invites, and when they dance, he leads, she follows; afterwards, he guides the woman back to her chair. You can hear her pant lightly.

Assuming one's feminism is slightly collaborationist, the tango is not all that harmful a dance, so it may seem strange to hear that many New Yorkers believe that there is far too much tango afoot. The anti-tango faction objects not to slinky foreigners, but to local moguls who have turned tango into a momentary industry, employing small- countriesful of strappy-heeled senoritas and brilliantined men to sashay and strut at their command. Last week, morning traffic came to a standstill on the West Side Highway when commuters stopped to gawp at couples tangoing in the middle of the highway, a promotion for Latin crooner Julio Iglesias, whose imaginatively titledalbum, Tango, came out this week. The pile-up extended back six miles. An enraged city transport official demanded that Columbia Records "take its pathetic publicity attempt somewhere else". It obliged, moving the dancers to Times Square.

It will only get worse. In December, Madonna's Evita hits the screen, and the accession of the tango will be crowned. The Evita signature tango dress, with nipped-in waist, decolletage, and full skirt, is already milonga- ing off the racks, 57th Street is shrieking E-vi-ta! with mercenary glee, and there's more joy at Bendel's than there's been since the days when the hat was de rigueur. New York men know that any woman who forks out the price of a laptop computer for a dress is going to want a place to show it; and they are glumly resigning themselves to vals crusada lessons for the new year - and cursing the day the pundit was born who decreed it took two to tango.