Surrendering to salsa
Steady and irresistible, the music reaches through the double glass doors and brushes passersby outside the Alhambra dance studio. Those who pause to look inside see a semicircle of men and women trying to keep pace with their two buffed instructors, who wear headsets and issue brisk commands. Keep your partner closer on those cumbias! Stay on the balls of your feet when you pivot! Guys, if you don’t know where you’re going, how’s your partner going to follow?
Salsa has shown us new ways to experience music, movement, life. During the weekly hour we spend at Let’s Dance L.A., our wonderfully unflappable instructor, Kristy, helps us channel our inner Celia Cruz and Benny More.
The class is a sort of otherworldly space, where people of different persuasions (cultural, musical, linguistic) shed their inhibitions and surrender to rhythm’s primal imperatives. Since my wife and I took our first salsa steps in the fall, I’ve been reminded more than once of a passage in Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Brideshead Revisited.” In it, the love-struck narrator speaks of feeling as though he had stumbled on “an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”
That’s a pretty spot-on description -- of what it feels like to learn salsa, and of what it can feel like to stumble upon a new pocket of a metropolis you thought you knew. Salsa has become our doorway into, and our soundtrack for, exploring Alhambra.
You could spend several lifetimes in Los Angeles and not have time to check out all the various worlds just beyond the freeway exits. Now and then, though, fate delivers you into one of these parallel realities. Alhambra has helped us redraw our cultural road map of Greater L.A.
There are places with bigger billboards than downtown Alhambra (the Sunset Strip), and places with more upscale retail (Old Town Pasadena, Third Street Promenade), and places with more tourists per square foot (Universal CityWalk, the Hollywood & Highland complex). But you’d have to look hard for one that better encapsulates, succinctly and unassumingly, what it means to live in Southern California these days. The planet-spanning mix of people, the kinetic street activity, the overlay of urban sensibility with small-town informality -- those are qualities proscribed by practically every city planner and sociologist since Jane Jacobs. In downtown Alhambra they seem to be fusing, even without the fanfare that attends chic enclaves such as Westwood Village or Santa Monica or Silver Lake.
Our salsa class usually breaks up around 9 p.m., and often we head onto Main Street, a short block north of the dance studio. One of our favorite spots is the diner down the street. (Look for the neon clock and you can’t miss it.) Here’s what you won’t find there: poseur actors wearing sunglasses indoors; inflated prices; tough meatloaf. Here’s what you will find: friendly waitresses; laughing mixed-ethnic couples; classic diner food with some great nouvelle twists; lots of families.
There’s a multiscreen movie theater a few blocks away, and some sort of multistory housing development going up, and a late-night record store -- all the consumer essentials. The collective impression, though, isn’t of a shoppers’ paradise so much as of an unpretentious community, where you don’t see bouncers herding the hoi polloi behind velvet ropes or hipness police patrolling the bars.
In its anxiousness to be regarded as a “world-class city” -- whatever that means -- Los Angeles occasionally forgets what made it a middle-class sanctuary for millions.
Heaven knows we need our Getty Museums and our Walt Disney Concert Halls and our high-rent districts. But we also need more communities where people can live and work, and afford to buy a house, and send their kids to decent schools, and go out on a weekend for a movie and a meal without having to hock the family silver.
We live about 20 minutes down the 10 Freeway from the San Gabriel Valley, in a neighborhood we love. But thanks to salsa, at least once a week, we’re falling in step with Alhambra.
Reed Johnson can be reached at Reed.Johnson@latimes.com.
