Dancing the in Streets

Let’s say you find yourself one night driving down a dark residential street, when suddenly, at the far reaches of your car’s headlights, you spot a fleeting movement… a person, no, two people out in the middle of the street. What are they doing? As you drive closer you see they are now standing to the side of the street, looking up at a big tree in front of a house. The woman points at the tree and turns to the man who is gazing at the tree contemplatively… but still… something seems not quite right… hmmm, you wonder why the man is wearing shorts with black socks and wingtip shoes… perhaps he is from Bermuda? And the woman, high heels with sweatpants? What is going on?!?

Well, if this happens to you, please stop to say hello, since it is most likely RWT and me out practicing our waltz. Yes, we sneak out in the dark of night and dance in the street in front of our house. Luckily, we can practice most of our dancing in the cool privacy of our dining room which has been semi-permanently rearranged with all the furniture shoved down to one end to create an ~12’ square dance floor. This works great for the non-traveling dances… cha-cha, rumba (our favorite), salsa and swing, but for the dances that circle the dance floor (waltz, foxtrot and tango), it is simply too small.

When we first started ballroom dancing, we practiced the traveling dances by going around the inside of the house (which fortunately, as the infamous Miss Marcia S would say, “has good flow”)... dining room to family room (watch out for the footstool!) to kitchen (aack, don’t hit your elbows on the second doorway!) to the study (no, don’t do that turn on the carpet, my shoes stick too much!) to the living room (ouch, you backed me into the couch!) and back to the relatively spacious dining room. But now that we are advancing in our dancing, we’re starting to do more and more fancy moves that require additional space for our flailing arms and legs. So outside it is…

At the moment we are working on a waltz move affectionately referred to by our dance teacher as the “18-steps from hell” (a reverse turning box). Basically we have to waltz as we’ve learned it for the last nine months, only do all the moves backward. And then alternate between the two directions. Truly mind boggling and results in a lot of stepped-on toes (usually mine). However, things are progressing well and I can even follow RWT’s leads as he randomly (at least from my viewpoint) decides which way we are turning and if I should be stepping forward with my right foot or my left or stepping backward with my left foot or my right…

Meanwhile, our neighbors lie in their beds at night wondering why they keep hearing a faint “one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three…” Just wait until we start working on our tango!