At exactly 7:55, line dancing, which starts at 8, was in full swing of course. S and I scurried to once side to take our jackets off and then scurried to the other side in the back corner of the room to take up our dancing places. I immediately noticed that instead of Other Mullet standing in the front, one of the women who I'd been talking to in the beginner class last week was standing there. I'd like to think I inspired her (see? see how the ego thing gets out of control from even one session with the beginners?)
We went over some dances from the first week like Ballando. S of course was the only person in the room to remember the ending, and so when she did it, Jean yelled out, Yes! Good! as if S had made it up all on her own, and S turned all red and was like, that was the ending you showed us! Yes, but she was the only one who did it, which made it that much better.
Then we did I'm A Good Girl during which I was always turned slightly towards a corner instead of facing a wall because I could not grasp one of the three-quarter turns and never was sure which way I should have been facing.
Next S and I learned Cha Cha Espana that the rest of them had learned the week before when we were not there. It is very similar to some of the other dances we know, so as we were learning, I kind of did some steps automatically, and S was like, Do you know this dance? I was like, I think we learned it before. But we hadn't because it ended abruptly when I thought there was more, so I figured it was a melding of some of the other dances we've done. It was pretty simple.
And then, we did Hello, Dolly, I shit you not. The kicker is that the woman in front of us who has learned it for several sessions still was having some issues with it. I wanted to be like, How can you not know this dance by now??!?!?!! Some of the newer dancers didn't know it the whole way through so, step-by-step, count-by-count we went over it again. For the 8 thousandth time.
When Jean was finished showing the steps, some of them were still hesitant. So Jean surveyed the room and said to them, The whole back row knows it so when you turn around, watch them.
The back row from window to the pool room was S, me, "April," and the two Irish-Catholic women, and all of us have danced Hello, Dolly for several years. However, when Jean told the new dancers to watch the back row, "April" simply took two steps forward so she was clearly no longer in the back row. That's when S and I started laughing really loudly as did "April," the Scottish Dancing Woman, and the two other women in front of her.
The louder woman from the clique was shouting out, Yes, watch the twelve year olds because they know it because their brain cells can remember the steps.
Um, so can yours and you're not twelve.
We're not twelve either. And that's not why we were laughing. You missed the funny part.
After Hello, Dolly, which btw, "April" knew and danced flawlessly, Jean took a break to make two announcements. The first was about a new venue for dancing, which is my old church. Yup, like I really want to go back there. The other was that for those of us who know a certain person who used to dance with us, Jean saw her in the craft store and she's doing better. Then, the louder clique member decided to give us more details--the kind of sickness she had, when she went back to work, when she planned to dance again. S told me that when she's not in class, I, too, should share all the personal information with everyone who doesn't necessarily need to know it or even really want to know it.
Then, to bring down the class, we learned a very stupid dance that S and I had already learned at St. Cath's. It involved pairing up. It involved dancing in a circle. Because we dance in a room that can be divided, there's a two or three foot wide wall from floor to ceiling in the middle of the room that has accordian doors that can stretch out from it. That was in the center of our large circle.
To "help" Jean, a tall woman who we'd recognized as a more advanced dancer from St. Cath's who was now in this class was standing in the front of the room, telling us this was the only dance she really did know, and she showed us some steps. She paired up with the woman from the beginner class at first and then after we'd done the step twice, she left her partner to come to the other side of the circle by herself to show us how to do it even though we all on this side of the circle knew how to do it.
The music came on and we began to move but somehow S and I managed to bunch up with the two couples in front of us, and we had no room to move. Then Jean and the tall dancer who was helping wanted us to make it fancy by turning and leaping during one of the eight counts. S decided to wave her arms around as if she were in a maraca parade. I did not make anything fancy.
To show us what fancy really means, tall helper woman danced with the wall. I shit you not, she got close to the wall and jumped and skipped around it in a shuffle-scuff move, and I did not see how that was fancy at all. It looked just weird and lonely; everyone had a partner except for the woman she'd abandoned, and she was now dancing with the wall. I turned to S and told her flat out: This is my nightmare.
We ended the class with Something In The Water. Not only do I like the dance, but I like the song. It's a feel good number all around. It completely washed away the ick of the stupid circle dance.
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