Dancing Queen

Tomorrow I am going to attempt to pick up a new hobby. Dancing. Of course, as it is, I dance all the time. When I'm cleaning, when I'm in the car, when I have ten minutes left at work, when I'm shopping. If I'm not with a friend, I try to keep it to a subtle head bob or toe tap. No need to freak people out. But if someone is with me, there are no holds barred and whatever body part wants to jut out and shake to the beat is free to do so.

But I think it's time to learn the actual art of dancing. Some actual steps and perhaps an actual whole routine to a song. I enjoy music and find it irresistible to dance to (seriously, how do people listen to their iPods in public and not dance??) and am excited to learn how to really, seriously, dance to it. I've chosen to take a hip hop class, because that type of dancing goes with my favorite type of music.

My mom is pretty excited that I'm taking a dance class. These days, I often hear her say, "I've finally got a daughter!" because I was such a tomboy when I was growing up. I didn't like dresses, now I do. I didn't like shopping, now I do... on most days. I didn't want to take a dance class, and here I am, starting tomorrow. I know if my mom had chosen the type of dance I'd learn, it'd either be jazz (which I'm not against, I just got excited when I saw beginners adult hip hop was available) or tap.

I have this vague memory from when I was approximately 6-years-old. We lived off garage sale deals. Some of the best things from my childhood came from garage sales and cost my mom only fifty cents- desks, favorite shoes, huge teddy bears. We also had an amazing basement. Half of it was a finished play room for us kids. We had a huge TV, two couches that could be spilled on or whatever kids do to harm furniture and it didn't matter, my brothers' toy trunks were down there filled to the brim with GI Joes, Transformers, and Star Wars action figures and there was plenty of room to just run around and go safely nuts on the carpet. The other half of the basement was unfinished and turned into a little gym. My brothers had a kid-sized basketball court, I could rollerskate down there, I set up my little plastic bowling equipment there... it was a kid's dream!

So the point of this information is, one day, my mom came home from a morning of shopping at garage sales and found me playing in our mini-gym in the basement. She told me she found a great gift for the both of us. I was pretty interested. Maybe it was a doll. Maybe it was a water gun. Maybe it was a baseball glove so I wouldn't have to borrow from my brothers when we played catch. How this would reward her and me, I'm not sure. Maybe just the look on my eyes when she presented me with one of the above was going to be her part of the gift.

So she told me to stay in the basement while she retrieved the gift. She came down with a plastic grocery bag, incredibly excited to reveal this treasure for the both of us. I opened it up and inside were... two pairs of black tap shoes. One for her and one for me, complete with ribbony black shoelace.

I wasn't really feeling that.

My mom was super excited. She had us both put the shoes on and she reached back in her memory to her days of dancing with her twin, I assume, and tried to teach me the basic dancing skills in our mini-gym. You know... shuffle, drop, step... I think? I think that was our routine. I wasn't hearing any tapping and I was disappointed. My mom was trying to keep the energy up and get me excited so hopefully I would fall in love and want to take a class. Instead, I was eager to get the shoes off but thought my mom would look really great on a stage. I had a thing about always imagining my mom on stages performing. I've never even seen her on a stage, so I don't know where that came from.

Anyway, I don't know how long we tried our routine, but my mom made a great effort to try to get me pumped about dancing and it didn't work. I don't know what happened to the shoes, but I avoided them. I wouldn't be surprised if I hid them. As much as I loved watching people tap dance on TV, I wasn't up for another session of Shuffle, Drop, Step. I was just a soccer kind of girl back then.

But it has been 20 years, now, and I'm ready to take on the dance studio. I just hope I don't pull anything.