The young man sitting next to me with the Irish skin and the Kente cloth hat crushed over his red curls was so captivated by the bent neck of the violinist that he set it down in charcoal in a small sketch pad, the only fixed aspect of her violent, bodily performance. In the tango, the bow takes deep bites into the strings like long, fanged kisses and the accordion breathes and the piano tumbles, the sounds rising up the stairs from the lobby past the pyramids of red and white poinsettias to the “balcony” of the second floor, where, as at a nineteenth century opera, women sat straight-backed at the railings and men crowded in behind them to watch.

A few people noticed, near the children crawling behind the stage, a zany older couple dancing the tango, wild and frenzied, with a choreography very like the arrangement of the lady’s hair, which was half-brown and half-gray and pulled into a loose topknot that bounced up and down when she sashayed, large-hipped, into her slender partner.

But it was in the second floor wings that the old year danced in the new.

He had a rather unfashionable jacket of a dull brown color and a full head of snow white hair, a man of seventy holding in his arms a young woman in her thirties with a dark, fluffy bob and a delicate spine he exposed by resting a hand in the sequined dip of her turquoise dress. They did not begin to dance with the first notes of a piece. Rather, he would lean motionless against a wall and she pretend distraction with something far across the floor. Each time I missed the moment that they sprang together.

And the tango is such a lovely way to move--so deftly, aggressively, at and yet with each other--arguing for a past within the present. Such a lovely way to age: his left and her right arm hanging limp, opposite hips clinging, hinging old to new. I envied the knowing way she held him: left elbow drawing his shoulder tightly against her body; the way he pressed her to his ruddy cheek, the hand holding hers bent in the awkward, predatory clasp unique to the dance; the worship and trust implicit in the genuflect and back arch of the very last step.

She was securing a strand of hair behind an ear when she saw me staring at them with more than the normal voyeurism aroused by exhibitionist dance. Without needing her to whisper a warning, he read the effect of my transgression in her body, and both took a step together to disappear behind a granite column. As I waited for them to emerge, the tango came to a sudden end and a group of Lindy dancers mounted the stage below for their 9:00 performance.

Then, in the wings, the old year spread open for the new, like a cloak of snow--a warm, silver fox coat, knowing that in the cold and the rain of that New Year’s Eve, she would need it to protect the passion and youth of the night.