Saturday, December 02, 2006

Not Such a Fool

I thought I'd do a short post on my mambo class last night instead of putting it in yesterday's comments. Nothing horrible happened, or at least I didn't do anything embarrassing. I can't say as much about some of the partners I danced with though but that's the chance you take in group classes especially when they are not posted at a certain experience level. No one in the class was a brand new beginner but the guy that kept stepping on the wrong beat clearly was not getting it. Tony is a really nice guy with no Hollywood or champion pretensions (he does have really white teeth though). And I realized when I saw him that I had seen him at the studio before. I asked my regular instructor about it and she said he's been coming there for years even before he was famous. I just never put the two of them together. Duh. A little inside gossip for those of you who like ballroom dancing, there might be a sitcom that takes place in a dance studio coming to your TV in the future. It's just in the talking stages right now, but if it comes to fruition, remember, you heard it here first! The class was great. Tony began by talking about how the mambo got its name (from the mamba snake), the difference between salsa and mambo (in salsa you step on the one beat, in mambo you don't otherwise they are exactly the same dance), the proper dance hold, hip movement and other technique, and then to the actual dancing. The pattern of steps he put together was all very simple and fun to dance but looked hard and complicated. He's a very good teacher. He was also wearing some form-fitting latin dance pants and well, let's just say when he was facing the men showing them their steps the view from the women's side of the room was quite nice. In order to add some redeeming something about books in this post, I forgot to mention in my rush last night that the books we ordered online arrived. They came in two boxes, one small, obviuously a single book box, and everything else in one bigger box. So far we have not been so very tempted, though my Bookman did sugest we closse our eyes and open the big box and pull out the CDs. I said no way because one of us would inevitably "accidentally" peek. Will we make it to December 22nd, the day of our Solstice celebrations? You'll have to check the odds in Vegas, but I think it's about 50/50 at the moment.