Canter Bridge

It has been a life’s goal, since getting married at twenty-three years of age, to learn ballroom dancing. It’s been on Linda’s and my to-do-someday list for all these years.

When I brought up the possibility of taking the plunge several months ago, my colleagues and their wives were too busy and my wife felt it wasn’t the moment. A more prudent soul might have taken some counsel from this unanimous withdrawal from what seemed to me a splendid idea. But I decided I was just gonna’ have to do this thing myself.

A bit of research on Angie’s List and some ancillary turning over of stones led me to the Let’s Dance Studio on Indianapolis’ famed E. 62nd Street. Well, actually, it isn’t really famed. In fact, E. 62nd street has that palpable ‘has-been’ atmosphere of shops, garages, and a let’s-do-yet-another-makeover-of-this-mall-so-that-people-will-come-this-time that seem completely unrelated by any common commercial thread. Not one to be put off by externalities—or perhaps too unobservant to notice—I plunged in, took a mental note of the red Jag parked always in the owner’s slot (wondering ever so gently what that’s about), I made my stiff little white-man way into the studio.

From my vast experience with ballroom dance studios—culled largely from viewing both the Japanese and English versions of the film Let’s Dance—I quickly concluded that this studio looked like most others. Mirrors on the walls, wildly divergent air conditioning zones, tables pushed clumbsily against the side of the room in order to maximize the space for dancing, and dance instructors looking way too athletic and lithe for anyone’s good.

I signed up.

Now at this point I must confess that for a twenty-five pounds overweight executive of decidely Caucasian and Pennsylvania German lineage who feels things deeply in his heart but does not customarily allow such matters to migrate to his hips, signing up for dance lessons all by himself feels rather oddly like visiting an adult book store. I don’t know why it should be so, nor do I have significant experience in such pursuits. It just seems a little off the beaten track.

And, of course, it is.

It is patently obvious to me and anyone who cares to observe this strange little odyssey that I lack the gene pool for success at dancing. The nature-or-nurture balance on this one tilts in a violent and near-vertical position. I am going to have to be taught to dance, as I have not moved like this since the rather compressing experience of childbirth. My own, I mean.

Fortunately, the cavalry rode quickly to the—my—rescue. Jean, the matron of Let’s Dance, presumably the owner, and even more presumably the title-holder of that Jag, approaches one with the smooth sincerity of one who knows what much of the rest of her society has not known: that people must dance and that I have finally come to my senses on the point. Though we both understand that reality does not work this way, she puts me at ease as though I’m roughly the twenty-seventh forty-something bald guy to walk in and sign up this morning. One could hardly feel better about oneself while Jean is about.

Soon I am introduced to my dance instructor. Here I must digress.

When one meets Rebekah-the-Dance-Instructor—one senses quickly that instructress is not the operative term—it requires approximately two-and-a-half seconds to discern that Rebekah-the-Dance-Instructor is arguably the most gorgeous woman ever to tread upon the chipped cement of E. 62nd Street or, for that matter, any chipped cement anywhere for quite some time. Is this going to work, one wonders, suddenly noticing how very old and rotund one’s image in the ubiquitous mirrors appears.

Rebekah is of African-American and Latin lineage, of undetermined age, and has apparently not engaged in a graceless maneuver since urping up in her high chair while still in the pre-speech epoch of her dancing life.

Yet, what to my wondering and second-guessing eyes should appear, but a most engaging, patient, pedagogically-mature dance instructor who seems not to notice how very odd and unbalanced figure we cut in the mirror as Rebekah and I practice, say, our ‘fifth position’ turns or recall ever-so-gently that my posture really should be more erect at this point of the waltz. Either she seems not to notice, that is, or saves her chuckles for the break room. Or—and this is probably the correct answer, as ‘C’ so often is—she really enjoys watching my long battle with graceless movement lurch to a new level of tolerable grace.

You should see me now! No, wait, I didn’t say that! It’s far too early to say that!

But the truth is, I’ve endured and even prospered under Mother Jean’s returns to the dance floor to carry out my periodic checks on four different dances: the waltz, the merengue, the mambo, and the rhumba. Even my hips have begun to break free of their life-long torpor and move, in the most modest and decent manner imaginable, to the beat.

Having raced through my introductory sampler package of dance lessons, I quickly signed up for the fifteen lessons of the ‘Social Ease’ level. Now ‘Social Ease’, if one may be permitted to say so, sounds vaguely like it came from the list of remedial programs offered in the prison where Jack Nicholson lived out the story of One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest. There is an uncomfortable and therapeutic condescencion in the term. Yet my young but meteoric career on the ballroom woods assures us, gentle reader, that this tolerable misapprehension of my objectives (social ease?) shall soon pass and I will be on to the much more normal-sounding ‘Bronze’ level of instruction.

Rebekah, however, tells me with only modestly evident suppression of a giggle, that I am doing so well that there may be time for me to experiment with the tango while still enduring the confines of the ‘Social Ease’ experiment.

I have some Argentine friends. I hope they are not reading this.