Sometimes, when you haven’t been able to really dance in ages, even line dancing gives you a the necessary hit.
I’m not a big line-dancer, I mean, I’ll do it – because I don’t mind country music, but most of the traditional line dances are just…repetitive (unless it’s Cotton-Eye Joe, which is like running a marathon). But ship-side, at least on this ship, when we host a line dance party it’s not traditional line dancing, despite the fact that I wear a country girl outfit for the occasion (everything except the pig-tails, because even I will not go that far).
The DJ always starts easy; the first dance keeps your feet on the floor and doesn’t even leave me breathing heavily. He leads that into the two most over-done line dances in the world (cue the Electric Slide and the Cupid Shuffle, I loathe the cupid shuffle…5 minutes of the same six steps with which I have truly bizarre associations. Don’t ask) – but then he finally lets us do the Wobble.
Actually, watching the guests attempt to do the Wobble is rather entertaining as it involves a fair amount of jumping back and forth. The trick for those of us on the team who are leading this thing is not to let it get out of hand. The Wobble was kind of…designed for hip movement. This is not your grandmother’s line dance. The guests can do what they want, but we are supposed to stay PC.
And then…it goes latin.
I don’t know where the DJ found this Brazilian line dance he always finishes with, but this is actually hard. This is the only time in a line dance session I actually feel like I’m dancing, as in I shift into dance-space, let my muscle memory take over and my feet just go. Every so often I look around the room and I can see people actually staring at me – and it’s for the right reasons. The click where you stop even counting because your body knows the counts since it was trained in them a long time ago. You want me to do a cha-cha? Let me do it properly and don’t call me out on it afterwards (not that anyone ever has, but hello, it’s Latin, you can’t do Latin with isolating your hips, it’s the way the dance works).
The session was in the time slot that fell in the middle of the show, so it wasn’t until we hit the last dance that we really started getting a crowd at all. Which is a shame really, because it’s always more fun with more people.
*sigh* Oh god, I’m a country girl….