Swing your pardner, muchachos.
I\’m taking salsa lessons.
Is that because I\’m Latin? Is it because my parents are Argentine, and I want to connect to my roots?
No. Salsa is from Cuba, not Argentina. In Argentina they dance tango, which looks a little like two people trying to kick each other while holding hands and kissing.
Salsa, on the other hand, when done right, looks like you\’re trying to balance on a big rubber ball.
Only I don’t do it right, so I look like I\’m on a really humane death-march: One, two, three, rest. One, two, three, rest.
It\’s in the hips, they tell me.
That doesn\’t mean a thing to me. But I don\’t tell them that.
I started about two months ago, learning a style called \”Salsa Rueda\”. That\’s where you dance salsa with a partner, but all the couples make up a big circle. A leader then calls out all kinds of moves, and you\’re constantly switching partners. Like polygamy without commitment.
So last week we got put in the intermediate \’rueda\’ despite not really knowing any of the moves. The results were disastrous.
The leader called something known as a \’Sombrero\’, which means I-don\’t-know-what-the-hell-it-means. The lady I was dancing with at the time was clearly disappointed.
But hey, that\’s what dancing is all about, right? I mean, the whole thing is set up to be embarrassing for the man: my girlfirend is there, and all she has to do is follow my lead.
But I don\’t know how to lead her; I barely know my own steps.
Then you\’ve got the dance instructor, the leader of the \’rueda\’, who shoves me in the kidney while I\’m switching partners: “Move faster,” he barks.
And he shoves hard, he does. Right in the small of my back, because he\’s not just trying to get me to move faster, he\’s also punishing me for all my previous slowness.
And best of all, my mom is there (it was her idea for my girlfriend and I to dance in the first place). She’s a good salsa dancer and an enthusiastic teacher. Unfortunately her advice tends to come while I\’m trying to listen to the instructor explain the steps. That way, I don\’t really hear what either of them says, and I end up knowing less than before.
The logical conclusion to this, of course, is that after a while the circle instinctively shrinks, squeezing me out like a pimple.
I stand on the outskirts for a while, pretending I\’m still part of the group, bobbing my head. But the circle moves, amoeba-like, away from me, slowly enough that it\’s hard to notice. And before I know it, they\’re on the other side of the room, and the dance-studio mirrors make it look like there are hundreds of them, all far away from me.
Well, to be honest, that only happened once. And they didn’t so much squeeze me out as I squeezed myself out, after I got tired and confused.
But my point is that dancing is a very social activity. And salsa-rueda is even more so. Because if you screw up, you screw everybody up. And that includes all the people in the mirrors.
The solution is to dance better. To dance faster. And to avoid the kidney punches.
But that’s easier to think about than it is to do. Especially with moves with names that translate as “hat” and “plug” and “double-plug”, it becomes difficult to concentrate on what your feet are doing.
But here’s my advice: next time you go into a Latin bar, go up to a pretty lady (or man) and say to her, “Hola, want to dance the double-plug with me?”
It will definitely be a learning experience.