The prequel to the award-winning The Church of Tango: A Memoir.

At seventeen, Cherie was on the edge of a dance career, an education at UCLA, a passionate love, and a life of her own. It was 1960 and the world was also on the threshold of cataclysmic change while she wrestled with twisted dreams, love turned dark, goals spun upside down, and debilitating depression that hospitalized her.​

Cherie taught traditional tango in Buenos Aires for many years with her Argentine partner, and their international students all asked her, “How did you end up teaching tango in Argentina?”​

This book is her answer.​

This award-winning memoir is not like any of them; it is not a “tango book,” but a story of survival that cuts across death, cancer, Alzheimer’s, loss of home and homeland and cherished heirlooms and possessions, loss of shared histories, of hope for one’s children, of hope for the future, of love. But it’s also about finding love and unexpected joy. And about listening to the music and dancing.

A story so sensual, so unconventional, and so shocking… it could only be true.

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After a series of life-changing and terrible losses, Cherie moves to steamy Buenos Aires, where the romantic attention of the local steamy Buenos Aires, where the romantic attention of the localmen reignites her youth and sexuality. But women like her, who stay to create a life and dance the best tango in the world, rapidly find themselves bombarded with flattery and compliments by the caballeros and milongueros – Men who see women as little more than sexual objects…making life for a free-spirited American woman more sensuous and difficult.