Swing Dancing

Yes, I went swing dancing. Amazing, huh? Michael, the "I don't dance" king of the world finally just bit his lip and stepped out of his comfort zone last night. How did this happen? Well. . .

Yesterday (Friday) I was text-messaging Lacey when she mentioned she was going swing dancing that evening. I mentioned that it sounded like she'd have a good time. Next thing I know, my phone rings.

"Hey Michael, want to come swing dancing tonight?"
"Uh, I don't actually know how to swing dance."
"They do a quick class beforehand and then I'll help you!"
"Alright, sure."

I changed into my "spiffy" outfit (Black shoes and pants, silver collared shirt) and got all ready to go.

An hour later my dad and I met Lacey at the Woodburn outlet mall and I hopped into their car. Eventually, we made it to the dance studio, but here's the catch. It was pouring outside and it was dark, so the car ride took much longer than expected, ie, we missed the quick class beforehand. Actually, that's not entirely true, we caught the last ten minutes of it, which only proved to about half the people there that I was a complete n00b. We had a big circle with two layers, girls on the inside, guys on the outside, and the guys were rotating every minute or so. I hadn't even learned the basic footwork yet, so I was pretty much useless during the class. After the class they turned the lights down and people actually started dancing, that was about 8:00.

I'm not gonna lie, the first hour was rough. Remember, I am so far outside my comfort zone at this point that I'm about 2 seconds from just running away, but I forced myself to stay and learn. The problem was, there was nobody there to teach me. You see, the guy leads, and so whenever I was dancing with Lacey, I was supposed to do all the stuff. I asked her what I was suppsoed to do for each "move" and she didn't know because she never had to do it. This was a problem, so what ended up happening was that for a while, she danced with a bunch of other people and I watched and learned as fast as I can. I'll tell you right now, that is a hard thing to do.

Eventually, I pretty much got the footwork down, which was nice because then I could actually start to focus on the spinning and what-not. Towards the end I was nowhere near good, but I was much better, better than a lot of the people there. Lacey's feet started to hurt towards the end and we had to sit for a while, but there were a couple of songs there that, had an inexperienced person watched, they would have thought that we both knew what we were doing.

The only big "oops" that happened was Lacey decided that at the end of the song she was going to do a dip. Um, coulda told the guy that's been swing dancing for a grand old total of 45 minutes! I'll spare you the gory details, but it ended up with us on the ground. I think I would have been more emberassed except that it wasn't a crash or anything, it was a gradual descent to the ground (that almost resulted in me breaking my ankle). Other than that, the evening went swimmingly. Oh, and the music was almost distracting because I realized that for every single song, I'd either a) played it or b) owned a CD with it on it. I own a lot of swing.

At 11:30 we finished up and took off. We drove down to my house, Lacey was completely exhausted, she'd been up since 6 am. We got to my house, she came inside and said goodnight to Quincy, we hugged, and then she took off to go sleep. I got home at about 1 am. I stayed up until she got home to make sure she made it safely, and then I went to sleep.

That was my evening last night. Impromptu swing dancing! Totally outside my comfort zone, some very awkward "Why am I here", "Can I just cry", "I really don't like this", moments, but as I got more comfortable I actually started to have a good time. Swing dancing is really fun, I recommend it. Definitely catch the ENTIRE class before the dancing starts, it makes life easier. I'll probably continue to swing dance, believe it or not, I'd like to learn to be pretty good so I don't make an idiot of myself if ever I need dance. Alright, that's it, the Snively Swing experience. Sorry, no pictures, camera was out of batteries and I was dancing. Ciao!