More on Dancing

28 January 2012 by kathleen.

I wrote a few days ago about contra dancing. The dance was a powerful experience for me, as you might guess because this is my second blog post about it. Despite being tired from 3-1/2 hours of nearly constant movement Saturday evening, I couldn’t sleep when I got home.

I never danced very much as a man. I was in high school when the Twist was popular, but my Twist always turned into a tangle! My family used to kid me that I looked like I was doing the Lumberjack Waltz. It sounded funny to them, but they actually picked up on the stiffness and clumsiness I felt; my feet seemed to be blocks of wood. So even though I took a few lessons in ballroom dancing in the mid-70’s (I was in my early 20’s), I never got confident enough to try to actually use what I learned.

My female cousins tried to teach me to dance when I was in college, but they weren’t much help. People kept telling me that I should just move however I felt, but when I did, women laughed out loud. My heritage is Polish and German-Irish; polka was what I saw my parents doing when I grew up. I felt OK doing the polka, though I was never very good at it, and there’s not much polka music playing in southeastern Virginia.

Because the contra dancing cycled me through nearly everyone in the room over the course of the evening, I had the chance to touch a lot of men in non-threatening, non-intimate ways. Wow! What a difference from one man to the next — what a wealth of information you can pick up in just a few seconds. I was surprised how quickly I could identify a man who just wanted a piece of meat to show off his dancing, versus a man who respected both himself and his partner, regardless of how well he danced.

That experience gave me a new perspective on choosing a life partner. I realized, too, that nearly all the men who made good dance partners were already married.

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