Dancing...

I’m just loving the dancing at the moment. We had a ropey couple of weeks at the beginning of January where we hadn’t been since mid-December, the teacher Tony was on holiday and we weren’t greatly enthused by his stand-in. It just felt a little flat, revising old steps over and over again and learning new dances we didn’t particularly like. But the last 3 weeks have been great.



Last week, right at the end of the class, Tony decided to teach us the basic rudiments of the jive but we were a bit too tired to take much in. Well this week we spent 40 minutes learning a whole lot more. It was great. Rich and I took to it straight away and I know we’re going to love it. I’ve always loved seeing people dance like that at parties and weddings over the years. Rock and roll, jive, ceroc - it all looks great. But, although I’ve tried occasionally in a drunken fashion to get the turns and rhythm, I’ve never been any good at it. Well, now I know how the dance is put together, the beat on which to turn and the neat timing of it. It’s brilliant.



I realise to anyone over 60 that you were probably brought up doing this stuff so can’t see what all the fuss is about but I think it’s fab. Because we were just learning the steps and it was quite a long new sequence, once we’d been through it as a class, Tony left us in our pairs practising for quite a long time while he went round making sure that everyone had got it. So we were getting on with it, going faster and faster and just grinning like a pair of loons at each other. Then I noticed a few couples who were struggling with it watching us and murmuring stuff like – “you turn to the left there” or “see, rock back”….felt like a proper teacher’s pet.



And then the illusion of skill was shattered when he turned the music on! The sneaky git picked a really fast beat and we all fell apart!! Still, once he’d given us a slower song to dance to, we could really feel what it’s all about. We’ve "got" the jive, I know we have and we really enjoyed it.



After the jive, a rest with the rumba. Now, you may not know this but it is The Law that All Men Hate The Rumba. It would seem to be a slur on their very masculinity to admit that dancing to a slow, sensual beat and wiggling one’s hips suggestively could in any way be enjoyable to them…. But I suspect this is not the whole picture. While he whinges about not being able to “get the rhythm” and it being “stupid”, I detect a certain pride and pleasure as he lifts his arm up to let me execute a slow turn before arriving neatly back in his arms …I won’t tell him that I’ve seen through him though…because... All Men Hate The Rumba…..



After so long on the jive and rumba we had no time for much else so a quick march round the room doing the tango (which we had apparently totally forgotten…it’s a very strange dance anyway…) and a romantic twirl of a waltz for Valentines Day.



As you can probably tell from my gushing, we well and truly have our dancing mojo back. Yay!!