Tango in Southern California

Larry fell in love with a tall beautiful redhead in 1989. Her chance remark that she thought tango was the sexiest of all dances led him to ask her if she would take lessons with him if he could find a good teacher. She said 'yes' before she went on a three-week trip to visit her parents.

While she was gone he researched tango in Los Angeles and did find several such teachers. He also took classes with two of them, one of them near where she lived. When she returned she went to a class with him. He quickly alienated her with his know-it-all attitude and she dropped the class. Larry resolved to restrain this attitude and has since had some success (some being very little).

By then Larry was hooked on tango and took it up with his usual thoroughness (nearly insane obsessiveness, actually). By the mid-90s he had taken classes with over forty teachers, most of them for only a few hours. A chance encounter with a remarkable man gave him a completely new outlook on tango. Casting about for a name for this approach he remembered the advice from a ballroom teacher from the '60s to "dance from the heart" and a salsa teacher from the '80s who called his school "Salsa Corazón." With no originality whatsoever he labeled his approach "Tango Corazón."

For over two years he worked on a short book on tango, trying to make it easy for others to get started dancing it. He put Tango Corazón - How to Dance the Argentine tango online. He thought a few hundred or at most a few thousand people would read it. In January of 2007 it passed the 350,000 hit mark and by June of 2008 the 500,000 mark. At that time it was receiving about 1800 hits a week, and the hit-rate continues to accelerate. More remarkably, about one in five people actually finish the book. Recently he changed the appearance of the book and now is smoothing the sometimes awkward prose and adding more graphics to it.

Larry's other claim to fame is a terrific son, daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren (two boys and two girls). He takes full credit for their terrificness, of course, and follows billions of other people in spoiling the children.

After being a policeman and Chinese intelligence specialist in the Air Force, he became a software and later a systems engineer, spending the last quarter century about equally between NASA and Boeing. He has worked on many cutting-edge aerospace and military projects. Name a project and he probably had a (very minor) role in it.

Recently he retired and is working full-time to turn writing from an avocation into a vocation. He has finished the first novel of a trilogy about an Irishwoman in the 1850s who awakes in her grave to find that she has returned from death an immortal shapechanger. He has well over half done of its sequel. When he gets blocked on that, he works on the first of a young-adult trilogy about a young woman who becomes a fashion model. He is at this moment trying to figure out how to sneak tango into it without it being totally stupid.

You can read Part One of Shapechanger's Birth at his fiction web page.