Clave is the Word

The mambo kings played songs of love.

And at UR, of all places.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Modlin Center, but the choices of places to eat nearby are lacking.

But Phil's welcomed us in with its usual bar crowd and a waitress who described the salad dressing as strawberry vinaigrette-ish.

Vinaigrette-ish? What does that even mean?

No matter, we eschewed ish for "The Cuban Spectacular: From the Big Easy to the Big Apple, a Celebration of the Mambo."

Because, let's face it, the mambo deserves some celebrating.

Not only was the show sold out, but there was a line of people waiting on standby for any unused tickets and it stretched down the hallway into oblivion.

Meanwhile, we sashayed into fifth row center seats, right between the student doused in cheap cologne to mask her body odor and a jacked up older couple who cheered the musicians after each song.

Maybe they were as tickled as I was about the big band-like staging with custom music stands with the letter "P" on them.

Just like Ricky Ricardo had for his band at the Tropicana nightclub.

Except Ricky's band had no female musicians and tonight we had girl parts on bass, sax, trumpet and drums.

In addition to the evening's entertainment, the multi-media performance also provided a musical history lesson.

We saw pieces of a documentary made by UR in Cuba about Cuban music, interspersed with live music and dancing.

There was a Cuban vocalist singing some of the songs (the Cuban standard "Guantanamera" which even I recognized), a blond student singing others (the Gershwins' "Fascinating Rhythm") and two dancers jitterbugging to "Sing, Sing, Sing" in spats.

Dixieland reared its head with seven pairs of khakis and a tux (not to mention a white tuba) doing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee."

The point was that mambo began in New Orleans, moved up the Mississippi through St. Louis to Chicago and on to NYC.

We heard Cuban trivia, like when a baby first stands in Cuba, people say he's dancing, not standing like we do here.

Telling, isn't it?

There was a demonstration of the habanera bass line which runs through all Cuban music, followed by a lesson in tango.

Two dancers appeared and the man, Edwin, had the hips of a snake and oozed rhythm no matter who his partner was.

He was mesmerizing to watch with his fluidity and effortless moves.

At one point, his partner swooned into him and he moved her body around; her feet stayed put as if she'd become an extension of him.

The consensus in my row was that those two could have danced to every song and we'd still have wanted more.

As part of my continuing musical education, I learned that "Oye Como Va" was written by Tito Puento (not Santana) and the band's spirited performance of it had the bandleader fanning the sax player after his solo and a couple of audience members dancing down in front.

"Bang Bang" was introduced as a "party song" and the three male and three female dancers tore up the stage to it.

On Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca," the keyboard player was jamming so hard that his keyboard was rocking side to side like in a cartoon from the forties.

Only then did we arrive at Latin jazz and the classic "Mambo No. 5," instantly recognizable to even the whitest of us.

Coincidentally, I learned that even the whitest of us had helped give birth to mambo, which came out of the Palladium Ballroom in NYC, where Latin jazz was played to enormous crowds (the club held 1,000 couples) back in the '50s.

That would be crowds of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, blacks and even Irish-Americans, like my great-grandparents.

No thanks are necessary. Just letting you know that my people did their part to bring you the mambo.

The Palladium also held pie-eating contests and skirt-raising contests between dances to mix it up.

Hey, whatever it took to birth the mambo.

Naturally Jose, the vocalist, returned for another Tito Puente song, "Ran Kan Kan" and a dance fest par excellence.

The only place to go after finally having achieved that Latin climax was back to the roots of it all and that's when the Hanover High School Marching Hawks paraded onstage, their bandleader marching sharply to lead them in "When the Saints Go Marching In."

The ensemble took up most of the stage, but it was the marching band's skinny clarinet player who seemed to be having a party of his own onstage.

I can't swear he was playing the notes properly, but certainly he got the award for most enthusiastic playing.

Hanover was joined by the full band for a reprise of "Mambo No. 5" and all at once our lesson in mambo was over.

I'd take the final exam on the jungle madness of mambo, but I'm not sure my hips are slinky enough.

On the other hand, I think I'd do just fine at the skirt-raising contest.