Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came
You wanna be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows your name
--Theme song of Cheers! (American TV series set in a bar in Boston, 1982-1993)
I especially "wanna be where everyone knows my name" because I live in a foreign country and my home and family are far, far away. I think we all want to be at Cheers! at certain times. So it's a great pleasure for me to walk into a milonga in Buenos Aires and feel at home.
Since I tend to go to the same milongas week after week for years, like most of the other habitués, we kiss each other hello (not goodbye), sit in the same chairs at the same tables, and watch each other get older. It's comfortable and wonderful.
Still, not everyone knows my name or me theirs. When we buy our ticket at the door, we check our personal lives, our worries, and our aches and pains with our coats, and enter the milonga where all that matters is the dancing.
It's traditional that between tangos during the time for chatting, we only speak impersonally (if we follow the codigos.) We never talk about what we or others do for a living, marital status, housing and living arrangements. We speak about the weather, the music, whether the milonga is crowded tonight, and perhaps give our first name. But often as not, we don't remember everyone's actual names and instead greet each other with, Hola, linda! or Que pasa, flaca? or Todo bien, jefe?
So perhaps everyone doesn't know my name, but still I am home in the milonga.
Thursdays at Nuevo Chique