I got to see someone last night I haven’t seen in 16 years. My old push dance instructor, Gary Long. I started taking dance lessons after my divorce in 1987 as a way of meeting women. His classes were IDEAL for meeting women, because of one thing: rotation. Everyone lines up and about every 3 minutes Gary says “Rotate!” and you get a new partner. So you get to dance with all the women in the class, usually multiple times.
After I graduated from Gary’s beginning push dance course, he knew what I was up to and told me I could keep coming to the beginning class for free. He did this because 1) there were usually more women than men, and 2) having experienced dancers in the class made it easier for the beginners to learn. So my dancing kept getting better and better, I was meeting lots of women and I ended up marrying the prettiest one!
After I got married, I made a HUGE mistake. I stopped going. Note: I’m saying “I” here and not “We”. Heather wanted to keep going, but I guess I was thinking: “Mission accomplished” and lost interest. I didn’t realize how much I missed dancing until we started back up about a year ago. We tried to find push dance in Tucson, but could only find west coast swing lessons. So we started back up, and have been having a blast ever since.
I asked Gary if he could squeeze in a private lesson in the next couple of days before we leave. He said “Absolutely!” So Tuesday, it looks like we’re going to get taught by the master. This will be our first private lesson with Gary. He taught us everything we know, but it was always a group lesson. So this will be very interesting. I will be taping this and maybe if I think about it later, I might try putting a short video clip of the lesson on my blog.
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