The monkey made me do it

Kind of like taking your grandma to a strip club

I went salsa dancing on Saturday in Redmond. It was just plain wrong wrong wrong.

Redmond, for those not quite near here, is known for being:
1. The Home of Microsoft
2. The Home of Ungodly Levels of Geeky Social Maladjustment
3. Having a really nice park
4. ummm
5. wait...
6. no,
7. well.
8. I think they have a mall.

I went because a good friend of mine, Gene the Salsa Dancing Machine, has been asking me for three years now to cross Lake Washington and dance with him. Also, this time he brought over one of my favorite bands, Cambalache. Faced with an evening of nothing but p.j.s and a movie or an evening of face-blasting salsa, I chose the latter. It started off great, I danced with Gene a couple of times and with a couple of other guys I recognized from my normal salsa haunt. Then I ran out of partners, and really had a chance to look around at the crowd. Bad move - there were men with peg-legged slacks, women with floral dresses (who wears floral dresses to SALSA? Keep them for church and christenings. There is something really disturbing about women moving their hips underneath tents with country patterns), and this one guy who seemed to think he was still at a lesson. Every now and then he'd shimmy down the entire side of the dance floor in a concentrated, head-down shuffle pattern with his arms up in the universal "I'm-holding-a-dance-partner-made-of-air" position. I had a lot of time to look around, since there were roughly three women to every man (normally when I dance it's the opposite, and there are nights when they won't let me off the dance floor). I danced with a couple of locals who remained stiffly in the ballroom arm position and chatted to me about work and how nice it was the the room was air conditioned. I think that's flirting in Redmond, I'm not sure. One guy said he had been dancing for over a year, and to prove it he let me go (BIG no-no in my salsa world - if I wanted to dance alone, I'd go do a non-partner dance form) and embarked on a series of flailings that told me that:

1. He'd watched salsa dance videos from the men who wear old-time hats and wide legged pants (lots of hopping)
2. His shoes weren't dance shoes (lots of almost falling over when he tried to slide).
3. He hadn't had a girlfriend in years. YEARS.

I tried not to look directly at him and keep my face composed. Eventually he took my hand again but I couldn't look him in the eye after the peacock strut he'd just performed.

I finally got asked by a little hispanic guy who was obviously a transplant like me, and I was actually relieved when he looked at nothing but my chest (to be fair, that was eye level for him). He smiled and didn't try to make small talk, and instead flung me up and down the dance floor like the spinning my hips was somehow providing the power for the whole place and if I stopped, so would the fun.

He was right. I left before midnight after a couple non-dancing songs spent watching the nerdy peacocks and their church ladies, then spent the rest of the evening watching Blazing Saddles and telling Rooster that he had more game upside down and drooling than these guys did with their luxury cars and condos on the lake.

posted by LadyJay @ 6:56 PM