So my big step towards expanding my horizons today was meant to be my very first professional stick shift driving lesson, but the instructor called this morning and said the magic car had been rear-ended and we will have to wait until next week. Stay tuned. I will be posting ample warning of my next foray (and in the meantime, the good people who work Sundays at the Burnham Institute needn't worry I will be practicing in their cul-de-sac any longer--they can get in to cure cancer in peace!)
With time to spend in the morning and the realization that jogging back and forth to spin class would be 12 miles roundtrip (starting from a cold 3 miles per week as I am), I decided to jog up to my first Zumba instead. I had done a couple step explanation tutorials on YouTube, but I had never taken the leap to observing or participating in a class until this morning.
I am not a well-coordinated dancer, and thankfully, instructor Luiz (probably not his real name to protect his innocence) said this was fitness, not a dance class (giving us participants license to make ourselves foolish freely). However, during the first song, our arm choreography was clearly the Macarena, a known dance. The *music* wasn't as familiar or as reasonably paced as it was when Al Gore tried it. You remember how it went (read this to the beat...if you need to look up the tune, I think the band is Los Del Rios): one alligator put-your-arm-out-alligator put the other arm out and pause and-another-alligator, flip one over shake your hips flip the other arm alligator...hey! Macarena! I think you then put them on your hips. We appeared to skip some steps in class today, possibly in part because we whizzed through them so fast.
I knew already that remembering all the variety of moves for the benefit of this post would be nearly impossible so I jotted some choice ones down during the water break. Here is what I could recall before I had to concentrate harder on not smacking into the former back-up dancers for the Miami Sound Machine that surrounded me on every side (except the back--two doughy men were behind me):
Following the macarena, we danced to Nancy Sinatra's Boots Are Made For Walking. I was encouraged that a Rat Packer's daughter joined the soundtrack so I wouldn't feel so hopelessly rigid in the hips. I could dance to this, but I couldn't quite figure the legs out, which were important, as they shape the boots and play an active roll in the boots’ movement. The next song was sponsored by the letter "j" I know from my limited Spanish--they said "hota" an awful lot. If there is a Spanish homophone for the letter J, I don't know it. My Spanish phonics is at the second grade level and my Spanish vocabulary is smaller than my dog's vocabulary. We moved into a Bollywood number, which made me wonder about the size of the craft services tables for the massive Indian music video choruses. This was tough work! I have even more respect for these dancers, and I completely understand why they are all skinny. Next on the play list: a non-fire-safety–related techno song about stopping, dropping, and rolling. I could drop it, so I was getting into it. The water break happened, and after that, the pace slowed down to a beat the kids on Jersey Shore might beat up and there was a lot of twirling to the back of the room or the side, which made me conscious of being the line leader intermittently. I was only self-conscious to keep going because I thought, somewhere in that room, there MUST have been someone as lost as I, and if she saw me spinning in the wrong direction happily, she might stay and do the same. Confidence burns calories! We just have to keep moving.
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