Several years ago my husband and I took ballroom dance lessons through the park district in our town. It was a fairly humiliating experience, I think mainly because of the ambiance created in the fluorescent-lit elementary school gym, with its food pyramid posters and protectively caged formidable face clocks, dirty floors and lack of windows. Ugh, how I hated gym class.
Anyway, our instructor was kind of a character. Maybe all dance instructors are, I wouldn't know. But as we would practice our steps, instead of saying, "one, two, three" or whatever, he would say, "ta-tee-tah." It kind of makes me chuckle to remember it. An awkward bunch of middle aged couples, well we were in our thirties then...and this kind of silly guy trying to de-spazz us all into some graceful moves.
Long before this Ron and I used to go dancing, when we were young, but that was a completely different thing. Actually much more embarrassing, to be drunk and think you're really a great dancer...yeesh. I keep having to "add to dictionary" all these made up words. Writing is actually a huge challenge for me, as I can't use any facial expressions, which are about eighty-five percent of my vocabulary.
Well, we finally did meet a dance we actually liked in our remedial park district class--the polka. The polka was so much fun. You got to spring around all energetically, somewhat like the "dancing" we had done in the past, but more civilized. Culturally acceptable, if you will. We had finally made it to grown-up dancing.
That was probably 15 years ago, and sadly, we have never had an occasion to do any ballroom dancing. Everybody likes rock now. Even at weddings. Well, everybody except me. Yes, I have turned into my dad, thank goodness, in respect to music. I am so glad I don't have to spend the rest of my life missing out on the really good stuff I am discovering now. It makes rock music sound like how my old dancing looked--yech.
