Dancing Lessons

This blog post was written and queued before Casey's death. If we stumble a bit over the next few days, please understand.

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching” … William W. Purkey

I love dancing. David does not. Right off the bat, we're looking at a compromise. I love the freedom of expression as my body moves with the beat and the rhythm. David does not. He feels foolish, oafish and clumsy. This is not freedom for him … it's agony most of the time. It's hard to “dance like there's nobody watching” when you're in a crowded room and you know there are lots of people watching, ready to comment on your expertise and style, or lack thereof.

Did you ever take dancing lessons? I took tap and ballet for about two weeks as a kid. I was not a naturally graceful girl. I was awkward and couldn't quite manage the steps in sync with the rest of the class. I'm a solo kind of dancer. No Electric Slide for me. I like to march to my own drummer, as it were. The dance teacher suggested another avocation for me.

David and I took ballroom dancing lessons once while we lived in Denver. We chose a course offered on the far side of town so no one would know who we were. We learned to waltz and two-step, cha-cha and rumba. We did pretty well until we attended a wedding shortly thereafter and remembered nothing. We concentrated so hard on our footwork, we really didn't enjoy the dancing at all. So much for that. We are decidedly not Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or material for Dancing With the Stars.

Even though David dislikes dancing, if we're at a place where we can dance, I can usually coax him onto the dance floor later in the evening … after a few beers, say. He's good for a slow dance and maybe one or two fast dances and then he's done. I make the most of it while I can. In the Dominican Republic, we learned to do the meringue. It takes little body movement and David found it easy to learn. “Just pretend you have to pee”, a friend instructed us. To this day, we refer to it as the pee-pee dance.

We've seen lots of dancing in our travels. Each place seems to have traditional dances and movements. We've been invited to join in some and others, we just prefer to watch.

We dance on board sometimes. I'll put on a CD with a good beat or maybe a slow, sultry kind of song and we dance around on the tiny salon sole, enjoying the moment and each other. He'd rather sit through “Flashdance”, “Dirty Dancing” or “Footloose” than have to dance himself though.

All that said, when a good looking Argentine woman invited David to tango in Buenos Aires, he was on the floor in a flash. Hmmm … he must really like the tango.