Well, my whole body is exhausted, my lower back is starting to complain, and I have a gigantic blister threatening to take over my right pinky toe, but boy, did I have fun tonight! :) I ventured across the river to Paradise Ballroom for a live band "vintage swing" night, and it was well worth it. I was worried at first that it was going to be tiny and beginner-y, because when I showed up about five minutes before it started there were a total of six people there. But it picked up after a while, there was a great band, and there were some great dancers, dancers I could just sit and watch and try not to drool over. It was a small venue, but the floor size and crowd size was perfect; there were enough people to be sociable, but enough room to play around and take up space on the dance floor, which is a luxury I'm not used to, coming from dances like Jammix and overly crowded contradances.
One of the older guys there pretty much adopted me after the second dance, and I must have danced about half the dances with him. It was ridiculously fun. He was throwing me all over the place and leading all sorts of moves I'd maybe seen a few times but never attempted. I got a lot more comfortable with Charleston, which was nice, since I've always had a bit of a phobia around that. I also (sort of) learned Balboa, but didn't get enough of that to really sink in. And I got thrown a lot of salsa and blued and other moves. He was great about breaking down a move if I couldn't follow it after a couple tries, and I don't think he minded much, since he kept throwing new things at me. In return, he said that he'd gotten to do a lot of moves tonight that he hasn't done in a long time -- he found out I'm a folk dancer, so figured (correctly) that I could do things like pivots, which the "hot dogs" (as he called them) who only did swing dancing couldn't do and would look at him funny if he tried with them.
All in all, I had a highly enjoyable evening, I learned a ton, and got thoroughly exhausted. Now I'm eating peanut butter on toast, my traditional after-dance snack that I haven't eaten in how long?, and reflecting on the goodness of life and the happiness of dancing.
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Current magnetic poetry:
dance
all
night
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3 comments:
Yay for pivots!
Yes, yay for pivots indeed. Though I usually manage to lead them on swing dancers alright. I think the trick might just be about how you get into them.
And yay for charleston. Now when you come down to visit, I can lead some more charleston stuff on you (I've been working on it a bit, too).
And kind of yay for balboa. Rebecca taught me a tiiiiny bit at last week's swing dance. Can't really do much with it, though. :-)
I'm so glad you're dancing!!! :) Keep it up! I've been having fun with salsa in Santa Cruz... and come the beginning of the quarter I'm going to try out the Swinging Slugs on campus who dance every Monday. More dancing = more smiling. :)
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