Monday, November 17, 2014

This adventure brought to you by salsa

I promised adventures so....

The other night I:

  • was dipped and twirled, lifted up and spun
  • had my toes stepped on so often I'm surprised they didn't turn black and blue
  • lost my shoe a couple of times
  • twisted at least one ankle, but I'm thinking both and really need to get a thicker ace wrap
  • learned how to salsa
  • maybe networked? I've been telling people I'm an independent brand manager, some guy at the bar was interested in that and asked for my number. I thought he was just angling to get my digits so I gave him fake ones, but now I keep wondering if he seriously needed help with promotions and I just tossed an actual freelancing opportunity out the window :/
  • learned that you really had to have a good dance partner.
  • discovered it's hard to dance with a guy more than a little shorter than you (wasn't even wearing heels) and pretty much impossible to get dipped though the poor guy tried
  • got to practice my Spanish a little bit
  • had a ton of fun dancing at a place and in a style that wasn't as sexualized as my previous experiences and that was wonderful

One of my roomies, if you couldn't tell, dragged me out to a cigar bar that has salsa dancing Friday
nights. At first I was really nervous, you're just supposed to ask/be asked by random guys to get on the dance floor? By people who all looked way more then a bit older than me (or maybe it's just my impressions, forgetting I'm 26 now and thinking I'm still the 23 year old who went to live in rural Africa. Probably didn't help that I only had a small make-up mirror that entire time).

I have never felt more like a Millennial; I wanted to take out my phone and snap pictures, maybe take a video. But no one else was doing such a thing, so I didn't, and lo and behold old, short Latinos were asking me to dance and taught me a few basic steps and then the younger guys appeared and man there was some fast spinning. 

I've always liked dancing, but have never been huge on doing it in public cuz of incidents in clubs during undergrad and how things are so sexual among my generation. It's a bit uncomfortable. But this was fun, constantly switching partners and enjoying the music provided from a live band.  You have good partners and bad ones (I had 50/50) but is was a good night, getting me out of my comfort zone and trying new things. 

Will I go again, most likely. But probably not anytime soon because my ankles really need time to heal. And I need new shoes, comfy heels, but because it's so much easier to spin on a point.

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