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The Worst Dance Class I Ever Took

For some reason swing dancing was a popular college thing in 1998, and not wanting to feel left out, I paid $50 for an 8 week course in the Lindy Hop. The instructor required prospective dancers to register in pairs, so I convinced a cool girl named Erin to sign up with me. I barely knew her, she was a friend of my ex-girlfriend from high school, but in the first weeks of your freshman year away from home that’s basically a close friend.

The instructor believed that if you learned to dance with one person you would reinforce each other’s bad habits and suffer irrevocable damage to the dance learning centers of your brain. To avoid this problem, he arranged everybody in a circle, ladies on the inside, fellas on the outside. We’d start the hour dancing with our partners, but every so often he’d ask us to rotate: start dancing with the person on your right. That way, you’d be learning to dance independent of a specific dance partner, and by the end of the eight weeks, you’d be ready to dance with anybody.

It was horrible. The only thing I learned was that women come in an astonishing variety of heights, widths, speeds, and levels of aggression. To this day I can’t tell you anything about the Lindy Hop. The women I danced with were literally a blur. And, in spite of taking an eight week class together, I didn’t really get to know Erin any better.