I've never been one to dance. I always wished I could dance, but I just can't. Not jazz or hip hop or regular party dancing. I end up looking like a soggy rag drooping around on the floor. And hey, it happens. Some people can sing, some people can't. Those awesome dancers need an audience and I heartily volunteer! So now I accepted myself as a non-dancer and moved on. This doesn't mean that I don't like dancing, just that I'm really embarrassed to dance in public. So what was I thinking when I bought two tickets to Lincoln Center's Midsummer Night Swing?
To be honest, I'm not quite sure. I read about it in the New Yorker and I'd seen various posters around the city advertising dancing under the stars, so when I had a free evening this week, I called up my friend, Ryan (E15), and sure enough, he said he'd be down for some dancing. Not wanting to do anything halfway, we decided to go for swing. While Ryan can rock a piece of choreography, his improv dancing isn't the best (he said that himself!) and I kind of have two left feet. Even still, off we went to a group dance lesson in Lincoln Center. The instruction was good, and for a while we were the youngest and most inexperienced people out there, but that didn't matter.
45 minutes later, when they opened the dance floor, we were ready to groove. It didn't actually matter that we STILL didn't know what we were doing. We were just having fun! We danced until it rained and then kept on dancing until even the band took shelter. A little while later, they restarted the music, and people flooded back out, this time onto the pavement behind the actual floor. The ground was all wet and people were slipping on the flagstones, but that didn't stop people from dancing until they shut the place down.
In the end, I'm really glad I went. Ryan had just finished his Organic Chemistry final exam, and I've been kind of bored hanging around the house, so it was great to get out and get moving. Yeah, it was scary getting out there in new territory, but after an hour or two of trying to look like people who knew what they were doing, I gave up. I guess that's resignation, but it didn't feel like it. All it felt like was that I was able to listen to the music and to dance with one of my best friends.