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Drinking the Kool-Aid and going for a dance.
So, this last weekend, K and I took place in our very first Arthur Murray freestyles event. I want to discuss it, but I want to discuss our relationship with Arthur Murray before freestyles so I can put it in the proper context.
When we first started, back in January, we got there.. K with some idea how to dance and me with none and the first day they had us dancing a handful of dances. AKWARDLY, but dancing nonetheless. We met our instructor Michael and the more we practiced, the more we found we enjoyed dancing. It was great fun. It was great fun TOGETHER, and acted as date time. And we both enjoyed getting out there and MOVING.
As our wedding loomed, we were.. still awkward but CAPABLE of dancing. And we were having a ball. I could loosen up now and then to not always worry about specific parts and just... go out and have FUN (As evidenced by the day we were dancing to YMCA and I took my hands from hers, breaking our connection, and did the YMCA dance.)
Our newcomer lessons came to a close and they asked us... would you like to continue? Yes! Gods, yes! We want to know more! We want to get better! Sign us up! At the time, they gave us.. the Kool-aid. The kool-aid tastes thusly: Arthur Murray is THE BEST. We can promise you that you will NEVER get a better education through the other (cheaper) dance schools. At the time, we believed them. Then they gave us the price on how much it cost.. and we had a BIT of a seizure. The price isn't important. I'll just call it $Alot. But we signed up anyways, and hoped we'd have as much fun in Bronze I as we did in Newcomers. That we'd learn more, and new stuff, but STILL have a total ball dancing.
Things stayed low-key until the wedding. We came back and then Michael informed us, in his usual mild way that now we were BRONZE students, we had alot to work on... and we would, he promise, and we'd get it all! We'd work on posture (I have an unfortunate habit of slumping a bit, especially when dancing with my more-than-a-foot-shorter-than-me wife), positioning and, yes, a WHOLE Lot of new material, because we'd signed up to learn SEVEN dances, five of which we already knew.
Conventional wisdom, at least within Arthur Murray, is that guys learn things slower than their female counterpart. THat's not to say they don't get it or can't get it, but that it just, in general, is harder for them. The new material started and I hit the wall. And I got frustrated because I was TRYING to stand up straight, to keep my feet in fourth position, to bend this knee here and leave it mostly straight here. Sometimes I understood what I was supposed to do. Sometimes I sat there with a blank look on my face trying to figure out WHAT I was missing.
And then there was Kristen, who GOT certain things faster than me but still struggled with other things.
Our first lessons together were HARD. Sometimes we just.. did NOT get it. (Our first Bronze I and II lesson we went to about a dance we thought we knew, Club Swing, left us confused and a little upset. ANd honestly, knowing more now, I STILL think the instructor should have been.. a bit better prepared) And the THursday practices where everyone was actually TRAVELING with Foxtrot and Waltz were.. a big mess. We WANTED to enjoy them, we did, but... it was crowded, we were already feeling self-conscious and confused.. and... when people inevitably ran into us (or us into them), it just didn't lead to a good experience.
At some point Michael comes to us and says "So, how do you feel about joining us for Freestyles? You can dance any dance you want to and it's always alot of fun." The day he first asked us we were drinking the kool-aid and it sounded fabulous but we felt clueless and unable to complete, so he dropped it for a couple months and asked us again a couple months ago, mentioning that the early bird special was going to end, so.. what do we think? We agreeed to do so, and decided to dance the dances we really liked.. Club Swing for me, Triple Swing for K. And Michael.. ah.. STRONGLY suggested we do something like Foxtrot, since we were weak in Foxtrot and not REALLY enjoying it.
Michael apparently has a.. vendetta of sorts. He intends to make Kristen and I (and at this point, it's more Me than Kristen) LOVE Foxtrot. I wish him luck. ;) I don't HATE Foxtrot. I can dance it now (after lots and lots and lots of lessons), but.. I don't know that it's ever truly be a favorite dance. Then again, who knows? I'm open to being wrong.
And so, having signed up for Freestyles, he started concentrating almost exclusively on these three dances (with a little Waltz thrown in "to keep things different" (though alot of the skills we learn in Waltz will help us in other dances too like Foxtrot and Rumba) and we worked HARD on.. correcting the problem K and I had where somewhow, we kept getting unaligned and running into each other and just generally working on form.
It's important to mention one other thing.. K and I have tried to be friendly with the people there and get to know them, but... neither one of us is exactly social butterflies. Even I tend to get shy around people I've never really met. And some of them tended to at least seem a bit dismissive towards us. So we never really got to know most of the others in our level. And that generally meant that while I WANTED to get comfortable learning to dance with other people, I mostly stuck to Kristen and, occasionally, an instructor. K also never really broke into the community.
so with that basic introduction in mind, let me tell you about freestyles. Firstly, Arthur Murray has TWO events.. Freestyles and Showcase. Freestyles is probably closest to what you imagine when you think dance competition. For Freestyles, each "Heat" consisted of up to about eight couples, I think, dancing on each side of a line (separating the two "Ballrooms" (Men and a Female Instructor and Couples dances on one side, Women with their Male instructors on another.) doing the same dance. Heats were separated by level.. Newcomers (for first time Freestylers, like K and I), Associate Bronze for those in Bronze I and II, Full Bronze for those in Bronze III and IV. Associate Silver, Full Silver.. and Gold. For everyone but the newcomers, you also have the chance to dance a Closed Dance (no chorography, you just dance the dance) or Open (previously choreographed).
Got it?
This was K and I's first time, so we danced Newcomer level, which means we went first, both Friday and Saturday. K got to dances twice on Friday.. first, in Heat four, with Michael, doing Foxtrot. Then a few heats laters with me, doing Triple Swing. Then, we sat back to watch "Rhythm" Dancing (the difference between Rhythm and Smooth dancing, according to Arthur Murray, is whether the dance specifically travels. Foxtrot, Waltz, Viennese Waltz, Tango.. these are Smooth Dances. Everything else (Swing, Hustle, Bolero, Cha-Cha, Salsa, Mambo, Samba, etc.) is a Rhythm Dance.
We made the best we could out of just sitting there and watching. We cheered on for our schoolmates, wathced all the dancing, especially those we didn't know ("I wouldn't mind learning Samba. That looks fun!" "Bolero looks kinda.. eh." "Merengue seems kinda.. jerky." and "Oh gosh, we have to get at least to Full Bronze so we can do THAT!") The one mistake we made, though, was sitting right near the other cameras. Due to.. how annoying it was to have to wait on all the camera people taking pictures, most of the other students didn't sit near us for long, so.. we spent most of the night alone (Michael did stop by to be sociable for a bit). One small.. fun part of the day was when I got up to go to the bathroom, got onto the hard marble floor.. and took a spill. I've walked in dance shoes before.. on carpet, hardwood, etc, and I have NEVER taken a spill like that. So I check the shoe.. and the backing of the sole is totally gone, revealing cork and some nails. Not good. Long story short, I ended up dropping some money on new dance shoes. LUCKILY for us, as part of this event, there were people selling good quality dance shoes, dance costumes and pictures nearby. Luckily for me, because I was able to get new shoes before I danced tht next day.
We watched for a while, commenting on things, until just when the Open Rhythm Dancing started, about 10:00. We know, at that point, we were exhausted and needed bed.
The next day, we rose early, had Room Service, and got ready. This time, I was dancing first.. Foxtrot with Kelly. I got out there, feeling nervous but trying to put on a brave face and... made a couple of really dumb mistakes, because I was so nervous. And then felt like an idiot for having screwed up. A few heats later, we did Club Swing (K and I together) and I thought we did an OK job. No obvious moments of "Ugh. I should have known how to do this." (But, as I pointed out to K, this was our dance. We've been doing all of the same moves since a certain evening with a cowboy hat.)
Then, we were done. This time, we purposely sat at a table with people and spent some time TALKING to others in our class. As it turned out, they were both Bronze I students as well and so we talked. And we watched the Foxtrot, Tango, Waltz and Viennese Waltz (K tells me we MUST learn Viennese Waltz one day.), K wandered off to play Little Miss Shutterbug (but, hey, I'm sure she's got some great pictures of Arthur Murray students, so that'll be good.) When Michael stopped by, still annoyed at myself for screwing up, I told him "I don't like Foxtrot!", and explained why (I know I was whining. It takes me time to get over my imperfections. I DO, but... it takes time.). He told me, again, that before we leave.. he's going to make me LOVE Foxtrot. I remain unconvinced.
When everyone finished with the smooth dancing, there was a small break so they could set up something called the Potomac Cup. I had no idea what that was, but Mary Anne, the Athur Murray admin assistant walked in and sat next to us, telling us that 'the riot' would soon start. When we asked her what she meant, she explained that the Potomac Cup got LOUD, and that she kept expecting a riot last time. She then referred to this as "Stress Relief." All I remember, was trying not to laugh when the GOdfather theme came on and a bunch of dancers, of all levels, arrived dressed as Godfathers and 20s Flappers... that was the Maryland Side. The Virginia Side went with a "Panthers" (no idea which university football team, since I don't watch that, but that direction.) It was another dance competition between Maryland and Virginia schools, but unlike the other dance competitions, this one was NOT taken as seriously. Dances of each level danced one dance, and the instructors at the sideline, bearing signs and hats and what other things.. start dancing. The results were just... insane silliness. ESPECIALLY when the Maryland instructors started line dancing to, I think, a cha-cha.
And at that point, I had fallen in love with Freestyles.
Two hour break to prepare the ballroom for the award ceremony/dinner. We took a brief nap, cleaned up (it was a black tie affair. So, I wore the same outfit I'd worn earlier, without the number on my back and with a suit jacket.) Then we got in, found our seats (we were sitting with Michael, two of Michael's students and an older couple who were Full Bronze students. There was open dancing and this time I DANCED WITH OTHER STUDENTS.. at least Melinda and Evonne, whom K and I had sat with earlier that day. I also HAD to do the Foxtrot with Kelly one more time, just to excise my own inner demons and remind myself I CAN Foxtrot, but I was just nervous. K also danced with.. well.. lots of people. I noticed that all the instructors and a number of the more higher leveled students made a point of picking out people (newcomers?) sitting down and asking them to dance. So K got to dance with various instructors and various students. Until her legs and feet gave out. At the time, K says, it made sense to remove the gel pads from her shoes, but she started getting overtired, her legs ached and she started getting a blister so about 3/4 of the night in.. she was DONE! I remember at one point, she tried to do a Foxtrot with me and her legs just would NOT work properly. So she sat down.
The night... I remember mostly the open dancing, though the conversation at the table was interesting and, importantly, it was good to really get to KNOW some of the other students there. It'll make it easier to be less shy and actually dance with them in the future.
So.. we danced. ALOT. And we drank the kool aid again and wonder why we were feeling so meh about Arthur Murray. We'll keep going. We'll figure out how to pay and make it work. Just like we'll DEFINITELY do freestyles next year, about six months from now. And next time, I'll do the Potomac Cup.
It was a great time. We both had a great time. It was hard to wake up, go downstairs, look at the area where we'd had so much fun just that last night and see it now was set up totally different, the ballroom gone, a stage set up. ANd we knew, then, that it was in the past, that there'd be no more wild night of dancing. Well, not for, maybe, another two Saturdays. As it turns out, Arthur Murray DOES host Saturday Night dancing, for a small cover charge.
At the end of the day, I believe that Arthur Murray is the best. At least for us. They're expensive, but we're LEARNING, and when we know, we can have fun. And.. it's nice to belong to a community.
As I said to K... you know, in a year from now.. we really SHOULD ask ourselves.. do we REALLY want to try to leave all this? Her church? Arthur Murray? My CC friends? Or should we somehow make living down here permanently a reality?
I dunno. It's.. a really really GOOD question. One we'll have to give serious thought to in a year.
When we first started, back in January, we got there.. K with some idea how to dance and me with none and the first day they had us dancing a handful of dances. AKWARDLY, but dancing nonetheless. We met our instructor Michael and the more we practiced, the more we found we enjoyed dancing. It was great fun. It was great fun TOGETHER, and acted as date time. And we both enjoyed getting out there and MOVING.
As our wedding loomed, we were.. still awkward but CAPABLE of dancing. And we were having a ball. I could loosen up now and then to not always worry about specific parts and just... go out and have FUN (As evidenced by the day we were dancing to YMCA and I took my hands from hers, breaking our connection, and did the YMCA dance.)
Our newcomer lessons came to a close and they asked us... would you like to continue? Yes! Gods, yes! We want to know more! We want to get better! Sign us up! At the time, they gave us.. the Kool-aid. The kool-aid tastes thusly: Arthur Murray is THE BEST. We can promise you that you will NEVER get a better education through the other (cheaper) dance schools. At the time, we believed them. Then they gave us the price on how much it cost.. and we had a BIT of a seizure. The price isn't important. I'll just call it $Alot. But we signed up anyways, and hoped we'd have as much fun in Bronze I as we did in Newcomers. That we'd learn more, and new stuff, but STILL have a total ball dancing.
Things stayed low-key until the wedding. We came back and then Michael informed us, in his usual mild way that now we were BRONZE students, we had alot to work on... and we would, he promise, and we'd get it all! We'd work on posture (I have an unfortunate habit of slumping a bit, especially when dancing with my more-than-a-foot-shorter-than-me wife), positioning and, yes, a WHOLE Lot of new material, because we'd signed up to learn SEVEN dances, five of which we already knew.
Conventional wisdom, at least within Arthur Murray, is that guys learn things slower than their female counterpart. THat's not to say they don't get it or can't get it, but that it just, in general, is harder for them. The new material started and I hit the wall. And I got frustrated because I was TRYING to stand up straight, to keep my feet in fourth position, to bend this knee here and leave it mostly straight here. Sometimes I understood what I was supposed to do. Sometimes I sat there with a blank look on my face trying to figure out WHAT I was missing.
And then there was Kristen, who GOT certain things faster than me but still struggled with other things.
Our first lessons together were HARD. Sometimes we just.. did NOT get it. (Our first Bronze I and II lesson we went to about a dance we thought we knew, Club Swing, left us confused and a little upset. ANd honestly, knowing more now, I STILL think the instructor should have been.. a bit better prepared) And the THursday practices where everyone was actually TRAVELING with Foxtrot and Waltz were.. a big mess. We WANTED to enjoy them, we did, but... it was crowded, we were already feeling self-conscious and confused.. and... when people inevitably ran into us (or us into them), it just didn't lead to a good experience.
At some point Michael comes to us and says "So, how do you feel about joining us for Freestyles? You can dance any dance you want to and it's always alot of fun." The day he first asked us we were drinking the kool-aid and it sounded fabulous but we felt clueless and unable to complete, so he dropped it for a couple months and asked us again a couple months ago, mentioning that the early bird special was going to end, so.. what do we think? We agreeed to do so, and decided to dance the dances we really liked.. Club Swing for me, Triple Swing for K. And Michael.. ah.. STRONGLY suggested we do something like Foxtrot, since we were weak in Foxtrot and not REALLY enjoying it.
Michael apparently has a.. vendetta of sorts. He intends to make Kristen and I (and at this point, it's more Me than Kristen) LOVE Foxtrot. I wish him luck. ;) I don't HATE Foxtrot. I can dance it now (after lots and lots and lots of lessons), but.. I don't know that it's ever truly be a favorite dance. Then again, who knows? I'm open to being wrong.
And so, having signed up for Freestyles, he started concentrating almost exclusively on these three dances (with a little Waltz thrown in "to keep things different" (though alot of the skills we learn in Waltz will help us in other dances too like Foxtrot and Rumba) and we worked HARD on.. correcting the problem K and I had where somewhow, we kept getting unaligned and running into each other and just generally working on form.
It's important to mention one other thing.. K and I have tried to be friendly with the people there and get to know them, but... neither one of us is exactly social butterflies. Even I tend to get shy around people I've never really met. And some of them tended to at least seem a bit dismissive towards us. So we never really got to know most of the others in our level. And that generally meant that while I WANTED to get comfortable learning to dance with other people, I mostly stuck to Kristen and, occasionally, an instructor. K also never really broke into the community.
so with that basic introduction in mind, let me tell you about freestyles. Firstly, Arthur Murray has TWO events.. Freestyles and Showcase. Freestyles is probably closest to what you imagine when you think dance competition. For Freestyles, each "Heat" consisted of up to about eight couples, I think, dancing on each side of a line (separating the two "Ballrooms" (Men and a Female Instructor and Couples dances on one side, Women with their Male instructors on another.) doing the same dance. Heats were separated by level.. Newcomers (for first time Freestylers, like K and I), Associate Bronze for those in Bronze I and II, Full Bronze for those in Bronze III and IV. Associate Silver, Full Silver.. and Gold. For everyone but the newcomers, you also have the chance to dance a Closed Dance (no chorography, you just dance the dance) or Open (previously choreographed).
Got it?
This was K and I's first time, so we danced Newcomer level, which means we went first, both Friday and Saturday. K got to dances twice on Friday.. first, in Heat four, with Michael, doing Foxtrot. Then a few heats laters with me, doing Triple Swing. Then, we sat back to watch "Rhythm" Dancing (the difference between Rhythm and Smooth dancing, according to Arthur Murray, is whether the dance specifically travels. Foxtrot, Waltz, Viennese Waltz, Tango.. these are Smooth Dances. Everything else (Swing, Hustle, Bolero, Cha-Cha, Salsa, Mambo, Samba, etc.) is a Rhythm Dance.
We made the best we could out of just sitting there and watching. We cheered on for our schoolmates, wathced all the dancing, especially those we didn't know ("I wouldn't mind learning Samba. That looks fun!" "Bolero looks kinda.. eh." "Merengue seems kinda.. jerky." and "Oh gosh, we have to get at least to Full Bronze so we can do THAT!") The one mistake we made, though, was sitting right near the other cameras. Due to.. how annoying it was to have to wait on all the camera people taking pictures, most of the other students didn't sit near us for long, so.. we spent most of the night alone (Michael did stop by to be sociable for a bit). One small.. fun part of the day was when I got up to go to the bathroom, got onto the hard marble floor.. and took a spill. I've walked in dance shoes before.. on carpet, hardwood, etc, and I have NEVER taken a spill like that. So I check the shoe.. and the backing of the sole is totally gone, revealing cork and some nails. Not good. Long story short, I ended up dropping some money on new dance shoes. LUCKILY for us, as part of this event, there were people selling good quality dance shoes, dance costumes and pictures nearby. Luckily for me, because I was able to get new shoes before I danced tht next day.
We watched for a while, commenting on things, until just when the Open Rhythm Dancing started, about 10:00. We know, at that point, we were exhausted and needed bed.
The next day, we rose early, had Room Service, and got ready. This time, I was dancing first.. Foxtrot with Kelly. I got out there, feeling nervous but trying to put on a brave face and... made a couple of really dumb mistakes, because I was so nervous. And then felt like an idiot for having screwed up. A few heats later, we did Club Swing (K and I together) and I thought we did an OK job. No obvious moments of "Ugh. I should have known how to do this." (But, as I pointed out to K, this was our dance. We've been doing all of the same moves since a certain evening with a cowboy hat.)
Then, we were done. This time, we purposely sat at a table with people and spent some time TALKING to others in our class. As it turned out, they were both Bronze I students as well and so we talked. And we watched the Foxtrot, Tango, Waltz and Viennese Waltz (K tells me we MUST learn Viennese Waltz one day.), K wandered off to play Little Miss Shutterbug (but, hey, I'm sure she's got some great pictures of Arthur Murray students, so that'll be good.) When Michael stopped by, still annoyed at myself for screwing up, I told him "I don't like Foxtrot!", and explained why (I know I was whining. It takes me time to get over my imperfections. I DO, but... it takes time.). He told me, again, that before we leave.. he's going to make me LOVE Foxtrot. I remain unconvinced.
When everyone finished with the smooth dancing, there was a small break so they could set up something called the Potomac Cup. I had no idea what that was, but Mary Anne, the Athur Murray admin assistant walked in and sat next to us, telling us that 'the riot' would soon start. When we asked her what she meant, she explained that the Potomac Cup got LOUD, and that she kept expecting a riot last time. She then referred to this as "Stress Relief." All I remember, was trying not to laugh when the GOdfather theme came on and a bunch of dancers, of all levels, arrived dressed as Godfathers and 20s Flappers... that was the Maryland Side. The Virginia Side went with a "Panthers" (no idea which university football team, since I don't watch that, but that direction.) It was another dance competition between Maryland and Virginia schools, but unlike the other dance competitions, this one was NOT taken as seriously. Dances of each level danced one dance, and the instructors at the sideline, bearing signs and hats and what other things.. start dancing. The results were just... insane silliness. ESPECIALLY when the Maryland instructors started line dancing to, I think, a cha-cha.
And at that point, I had fallen in love with Freestyles.
Two hour break to prepare the ballroom for the award ceremony/dinner. We took a brief nap, cleaned up (it was a black tie affair. So, I wore the same outfit I'd worn earlier, without the number on my back and with a suit jacket.) Then we got in, found our seats (we were sitting with Michael, two of Michael's students and an older couple who were Full Bronze students. There was open dancing and this time I DANCED WITH OTHER STUDENTS.. at least Melinda and Evonne, whom K and I had sat with earlier that day. I also HAD to do the Foxtrot with Kelly one more time, just to excise my own inner demons and remind myself I CAN Foxtrot, but I was just nervous. K also danced with.. well.. lots of people. I noticed that all the instructors and a number of the more higher leveled students made a point of picking out people (newcomers?) sitting down and asking them to dance. So K got to dance with various instructors and various students. Until her legs and feet gave out. At the time, K says, it made sense to remove the gel pads from her shoes, but she started getting overtired, her legs ached and she started getting a blister so about 3/4 of the night in.. she was DONE! I remember at one point, she tried to do a Foxtrot with me and her legs just would NOT work properly. So she sat down.
The night... I remember mostly the open dancing, though the conversation at the table was interesting and, importantly, it was good to really get to KNOW some of the other students there. It'll make it easier to be less shy and actually dance with them in the future.
So.. we danced. ALOT. And we drank the kool aid again and wonder why we were feeling so meh about Arthur Murray. We'll keep going. We'll figure out how to pay and make it work. Just like we'll DEFINITELY do freestyles next year, about six months from now. And next time, I'll do the Potomac Cup.
It was a great time. We both had a great time. It was hard to wake up, go downstairs, look at the area where we'd had so much fun just that last night and see it now was set up totally different, the ballroom gone, a stage set up. ANd we knew, then, that it was in the past, that there'd be no more wild night of dancing. Well, not for, maybe, another two Saturdays. As it turns out, Arthur Murray DOES host Saturday Night dancing, for a small cover charge.
At the end of the day, I believe that Arthur Murray is the best. At least for us. They're expensive, but we're LEARNING, and when we know, we can have fun. And.. it's nice to belong to a community.
As I said to K... you know, in a year from now.. we really SHOULD ask ourselves.. do we REALLY want to try to leave all this? Her church? Arthur Murray? My CC friends? Or should we somehow make living down here permanently a reality?
I dunno. It's.. a really really GOOD question. One we'll have to give serious thought to in a year.