Happy Valentines day! Here's to a holiday created expressly for businesses.

Last weekend was rather interesting. I got contacted by Vladimir regarding a gig that might be happening with a Persian singer named Faramaz Assef. Around the middle of last week, I found out that I would be dancing with Amber, who I contacted to find out if we could practice together prior to the shoot. Amber happens to be one of the better dancers that I now know, with years of experience in ballet, as well as a fair amount of time dancing lindy and tango.

So, we met up on Saturday, and ended up practicing for an hour and a half prior to heading out to the Valentine's milonga at El Encuentro. For me, the quality of follows usually dictates the quality of the milonga, although being able to hang out with fun people, and good DJ's helps. Overall, I had a marginally better time than at club Danzarin on Sunday. A slight damper on my fun was when I was entering a parking lot that was probably full, and there was a truck which was trying to back out of it. I honked the horn for a good 3 seconds, but he couldn't see me and his music was on too loud. Fortunately, the damage wasn't bad.

So, I got home a bit past 4 in the morning, and decided to open up the shades a bit to make sure that I'd get to the 11:20 call time in LA. I ended up waking up at 7, and struggling back to sleep prior to getting up around 9:30. Given that I ended up on set for about 10 hours, it was a tough day. The pay was a bit less than $10/hour, but it was worth doing.

I was the first one to arrive on set, followed by Amber. I talked to Faramaz about the lyrics, to see if they could be a source of inspiration. It ended up being the most lovey dovey !@#$ I think I might have heard. It was just line after line of things like: I was born to love you. We had a scene in which Faramaz was supposed to be the tango teacher, which went ok. The female lead in this was a stage dancer from LA named Parisa whose name indicates her Persian origin.

Here's a pic of us as a group:




















In later scenes, Faramaz is being wed to Parisa, and for a second music video, he happens to be wedding an actress named Melissa, who mostly sat around in a dress waiting for her part to actually start (around 9 PM, and she arrived around 4, yeesh). The fact that he was marrying random brides in two seperate music videos on the same day was pretty hilarious.

After the practice scene, I gave three of the contemporary dancers a primer to tango, which they never ended up using. Our next scene was actual tango, with Faramaz in the center, and 3 couples dancing around him and Parisa. The floor was pretty slippery, and by that time I was a bit tired, so unfortunately I wasn't able to give it my very best, especially compared to the previous evening. Still, it was fine, and to the random person who doesn't dance, it was probably excellent.


Here's a pic of the guys:












Here's a nice pose with me and Amber:






















The last scene worthy of note was the shooting for the second video, where our group dressed up as waiters. There were four hip hop dancers, to who walked off the set because of "explotación" to quote one of the dancers. Bear in mind this was at 9 PM, and they were doing take after take, because Faramaz thought the original choreagraphy was too difficult. Given that, they had to make something simple up on the spot. Something similar happened with myself, Vlad, and the third gentleman. So, I was taken off the stage because I couldn't get in synch with something completely new, and I ended up doing a solo.

Here's a pic of the aborted (at least for me) group dance:















Partly because of my frustration, and partly because of being slap happy, I performed what I would like to call, "Riverdance on crack." I considered this to be almost as bad as this Hasselhoff video. I basically did steps out of chacarera, where my right leg was moving a rapidly like a spastic horse rearing up on its hindquarters. Bear in mind I was wearing a waiter outfit with bowtie, my hand on my left hip, and my right hand holding up a tray with a couple of glasses taped on. At one point in my overenthusiasm / crazyness, I rolled out on an ankle and a glass which was taped on, fell off the back of the stage. I was ok, but I was laughing so hard it probably took a good minute for the next take, and the whole room got caught up in my mood. I'm not sure if I want this footage on the cutting room floor, it'll be pretty funny to see a random white guy doing crazy dancing in a Persian music video.

Overall, it was an interesting experience which might act as a door to other opportunities. It was fun, and makes for a good story. My roomate happens to be Persian, and I think we're going to get a kick out of these vids when they come out.