Nina Gabelko

The impetus for this post is to make sure that you get to see these pictures because I love them so much. That’s Flossie Lewis, who, keine hora will turn 100 soon, teaching a group of 3rd graders to dance the cancan.

You already knew how important THAT is to advanced language development. But the b&w pictures below are of Nancy and me show us teaching the lads to tango for an older students’ version of the same for another of Flossie’s classes. [Well, I’m no dancer, so I’m showing Jaime how to look like he’s tangoing.]

I suppose that I could now fall into a speech about how movement helps to overcome the objectification of the other, but we both know that Lloyd would have cut that before I’d finished typing this sentence. In case you’re wondering why the same lads are laughing in the first tango picture and looking on warily in the second, when I started dancing with Jaime, they figured out that they’re next. Nothing funny about that!!

But it is worth noting that, about 30 years later, these grown men who’ve been serious-minded engineers for decades, still come together from all parts of the country to have many hardy laughs about how and why they might have become such serious professionals. One explanation might be that they bonded with each other over the many laughs, even giggles, they shared at ATDP and the Coalinga Huron Avenal (CHA) House program. But me being me, I prefer to think that Nancy and I horrified them to the point that, together, they decided they’d need a profession that might assure they’d never have to tango with Nancy and me again.

BTW, bond all of us did. This past June, Nancy got those of us who could get to Berkeley on a Saturday, to hold a 35th reunion of CHA House. You can imagine how wonderful that was, but it was 100 times better. Next time I’ll show you a photo from the reunion. The pic is important because it is most reassuring to see that moments after greeting each other properly, we reverted to being as silly as we’d been in the olden days.

I’m trying to think of a moral for this story... I think it’s that if you start out being friends with wonderful people, it all gets even better as the years go on.

Yup, that's it.