Dancin’ Queen
posted in City life, Dance, OmegaDad, OmegaMom |In a comment to the previous entry, Kate said I should try the Lindy Hop.
Come with me friends, to a time long ago, a simpler time, a time when OmegaMom was a carefree single living in Chicago…
There was (and still is) a “lifelong learning” organization in Chicago called The Discovery Center. After many times flipping through their monthly course catalog and looking yearningly at the dance classes, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a Swing Dance class, even though (being single) I had no partner.
It was a great class.
The teachers started out slow. We partnered up with each other, and switched partners after every little bit of practice, and then, at the end of the evening’s class, they put on some nice slow jazz and we’d practice our mostly-klutzy-but-slowly-improving dance steps.
(Part of the idea, of course, was to introduce singles to each other. Sort of a pseudo-mass-dating scene.)
It was an eight-week session. By week six, Mr. Police Officer Into Nudism and I were heading out after class to Jukebox Saturday Night, on Clark Street, and tripping the light fantastic on the dance floor. We danced well enough, I might add, that we got applause and had people asking us how long we had been dancing together.
(Let us pause for a moment while OmegaMom preens herself.)
It was grand fun. Let’s put aside the fact that Mr. Police Officer kept a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants at all times. And that he really, really wanted me to come to the nudist club with him for a weekend. And that I was too uptight to even consider it. I got some experience with a radar gun and some dates out of the whole affair, and we both had fun at the nightclub.
The problem is that this was at least twenty years ago.
The additional problem is that OmegaDad has the rhythmic competency of a piece of driftwood: i.e., none.
The third piece of the puzzle is that, while OmegaDad actually can dance if he is very carefully handled by my cousin Sissy (I have seen this with my own two eyeballs), my cousin Sissy has the patience of a saint. I do not. So any practice would need to be done by OmegaDad and Someone Else. But OmegaDad is finicky about things…for quite a while, he would get insulted if some cute thing flirted with him in the checkout line, because he was Married! dammit! My explaining that the flirter probably didn’t see his wedding ring wouldn’t cause him to pardon her; she was automatically placed into the category of Bad Person. Anyway, I can hardly imagine how he would respond to dancing with some woman who wasn’t OmegaMom. Except for cousin Sissy, who is a special case.
Anyway, once upon a time, OmegaMom could dance quite well, and all the credit should go to the method of teaching, which was: slow, steady, and practice over and over and over again. And have fun.
Which is what I was talking about in my previous post.
And to all and sundry who said they’d take one of these courses if I started one, I will merely point out that I am in Alaska, Land of Wild Freedom, and you all are Outsiders. (That’s what they call the Lower 48 here: “Outside”.) It would be quite difficult to hold a class for someone who lives in Kentucky, someone who lives in NJ, someone who lives in Oregon, and someone who lives in Arizona.
But! If we were all in the same neck of the woods…! Hey, we’d have to just hire ourselves a dance teacher and have a grand ol’ time.
Right?
