Dizzy Dance

I would love to give you a narrative of what we learned in dance class, but my mind continues to return to only one moment that really has nothing to do with dancing and has everything to do with why S and I are friends.

We walked in and, amazingly, class had not started yet. It was about to. We went to our corner and waited for Jean to start. The class was on the fuller side again with the two older "couples" present. I don't know if the man and woman who do the waltz are an actual couple or a dance partnership. I don't know if the other couple actually likes one another since they never stand near each other or talk to each other and the only way we know they are together is that they come in and leave together.

The woman of this latter couple was standing in the front row as she always does, bewteen the woman who sits out almost all of the dances after the first eight count of each and two women from the clique. She was directly in our view with two rows of dancers separating us. S and I were standing in silence, staring ahead while we waited.

I said quietly, What the hell is going on there?

S responded, You are so in my head right now because I was thinking the same thing.

Across this woman's midsection was an elastic, ruched, denim thing about five inches wide. We weren't sure what it was or how the choice to put it on occured. To make it better, there was a string hanging off of it that moved when she danced. During our first turn, we realized, hey it's a belt! It was like someone had really long jeans and chopped off the bottoms and then fashioned a belt out of the scraps using elastic and a buckle that they also covered in scraps of denim.

The woman was also wearing sneakers that looked like they were airbrushed. Kind of like she was planning to be on an episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Anyway, the denim belt was a distraction all through class, but we didn't let it distract us too much from learning Walking In The Rain. I think it's Michael Buble or a sound-alike Buble and whoever wrote the song smushed two Christmas carols together and replaced the word "christmas" with the words "winter" and "holiday." The dance is 64 counts, which means it's long. Which means people are going to screw up a lot.

The dance includes a tag. We love the tag! It also includes another extra few steps "all the way towards the end" as Jean instructed, which translates to "in the beginning" when we actually put the music on and did the dance.



See that turn-point-turn-point move? That's a Monterey turn. It's the kind of turn that is difficult to make gracefully. That's all I'll say about that.

Towards the end of the class, I felt really dizzy and then I simply didn't feel right. I went to get water and S was like, where you going? I said I thought my vertigo might be coming back--I had it a few years ago--but I wasn't sure. We danced a final dance with me trying to figure out if I was still dizzy or if I was tired.