Dance with me.

My deep love for dance movies has been stated before and will be repeated over and again. What’s different about me saying it this time is that Dave and I recently signed up for wedding dance lessons at a club I found by doing a Google search, no less: The Starlite Dance Club. The club happens to be one of the largest in the country, even if it is tucked away in an unassuming building in the suburbs near Silicon Valley. Starlite was offering a free half-hour wedding dance lesson, to which you were supposed to bring your preferred First Dance song. After the free lesson, you could decide whether you’d like to sign up for lessons, so we went to try it out—nothing lost, nothing gained, right? But then we got sucker-punched because—after 30 minutes of not even knowing the feet work but being so beautifully led by our teacher that I felt more graceful than in my eight years of ballet combined—there was no way I was leaving without signing up for more.

From the parking lot, the club had looked dark, but when we opened the doors we unearthed a scene that seemed cinematically timed in its perfection. Women in full skirts and kitten heels swished down the hallway; a man, all in black from matte button-down and pleated pants to shiny shoes and belt buckle, hurried from the bathroom towards the dance floor, a duffel bag no doubt holding his “street” clothes swung jauntily over his back. Swing, tango, and waltz music all wafted faintly from different corners of a huge ballroom and smaller side rooms. People were older, people were young; people were Chinese, Latino, black, and very white; some were quite advanced, one-on-one with just a partner or perhaps a private teacher, and others were in a group class, chanting the by-now famous “quick, quick, slow. quick, quick, slow.” My stomach dropped to my knees, and I had to sit down because I was so nervous I felt nauseated. Here I was so close to this dream of mine—my secret always inner-life of being in a dance movie—and I was so afraid I’d be bad at it I didn’t even want to try. Not that Dave was helping much. He was clearly out of his element, and even he—so steadfast, so unflappable, so solid—admitted to being nervous. We were quiet as we waited for our teacher V.* to finish working with another student and come find us. We didn’t know who or where on the floor he was, so we just sat.

But after those first 30 minutes, I came home exhilarated, my joy untouchable. We sat down for a late dinner, during which Dave even subjected himself to one of the many dance movies in my possession, Dance with Me, which I had selected for its irrepressible Latin beats, for its thrilling scenes in the Cuban dance club, and for the hilarity of "Professional Latin Dance Face." And after we had unceremoniously dumped the dirty dishes in the sink, we turned on some music and danced for another hour, trying to hold onto what we had learned and to that feeling.

V. had *done* it. I’m sure the scene was significantly less cinematically precise, but nonetheless it would’ve been a sight to see: me bouncing between the arms of V. and Dave, a stupid-happy grin on my face. He taught us the basic samba step, going into a turn, going into a samba box step, and finally a traveling samba box step. Before V. had even gone over the turn, he led me into it, and I didn’t know what my feet were doing but I was willing to go wherever he wanted me to. He laughed, broke it down for us, and then had to have us try it quite a few more times till I had gotten the hang of what I had been so willing to follow him into moments before. What I mean by “V. had done it” is that despite how awkward our first lesson may have looked, he (1) made me forget to worry about that (no small feat) and (2) made me feel like Ginger Rogers, like I was wearing an evening gown and gloves and fancy slippers, instead of jeans and an old sweater ... he made me feel like I was floating on air.

After the second lesson, it was the same—floating, happy. That is, until I got home and tried to repeat some of the new steps we’d learned and found my floating come smack in the face with a brick wall. How do we get from a traveling samba box step back to the regular side-to-side samba step? I hadn’t a clue. How did my part go when we tried to travel forward, without the box step, with me rotating to the side of Dave? No matter what I tried, I couldn’t remember. Dave remembered his part, but his was the standard samba step, only going forward, so it wasn’t as tricky.

It has been said that Ginger Rogers once retorted that she had done everything Fred Astaire did—but she did it backwards and in high heels.

I give Ginger major props for doing so and for saying so. But from my humble viewpoint of two whole lessons, neither position is “chopped liver,” so to speak. High heels or not, none of it is easy, but the point is to make it look effortless. He seems to be in the position of control: he is the one that sets the pace (hopefully on tempo), he is the one that chooses the steps, he is the one that twirls his partner, he is the one that shields her from the other dancers, and he is the one that should catch her should she fall. But she is not just there for her killer legs, her graceful carriage, or for the way her boobs look ensequined. In order for him to successfully lead, she must be willing to follow (in my case, this becomes she must be willing to not lead, haha). She must follow his pace (regardless of his tempo), she must anticipate the steps to come from his body language, she must twirl away and find her own way back, and she must warn him about dance floor traffic he can’t see from his vantage point. He has the illusion of control, but it is full-on fifty-fifty, baby.

I guess what I’m saying is that on the dance movie poster of my life, my tagline would be something like “It takes as much skill and lends as much power to follow as it does to lead.”

As we’re taking these lessons in preparation for a wedding performance, of course I cannot let it go unsaid that there is something to that that resonates with life. Or at least that is what I anticipate. There is what I just noted about equality, power, and control. There is that he has his dance space, and she hers, but—think Venn Diagram—there is some overlap of shared space, in which they both cohabit. That there is give and take, and sometimes its hard to lead and sometimes hard to follow, and that sometimes they may get out of tempo, but it is their equal responsibility to get back in step, to get their “groove back,” so to speak.

And here is where it gets mushy and gushy: I couldn’t have picked a better partner. When I got so confuddled by the rotating, traveling, non-box samba step and threw myself on the bed, what did Dave do: Did he turn off the music? Did he change the subject, leave the room, or go turn on the TV? Did he give up on dancing that night or on me? No. He stopped being “the boy,” turned around and tried to figure out the ladies’ part with me. Now, that’s what I call a man: someone so secure in his own masculinity, he can deal with doing a few girly flourishes to help a lady out.

March 20 was the date of our first samba lesson, and it was also the time of year that we made seven years as a couple. None of those years were effortless, but perhaps at times they looked easy from the outside looking in. During that time, there has been long distance, miscommunications, the temptations of New York city and the temptations of women throwing themselves at D., a lot of anger and frustration, flirtations, probably a few hundred plane rides, the blizzard of 2003 and Dave moving to NY, the fall of 2003 and Dave moving back to LA, doubts, a seriously misguided “open” period, and a lot of patience and a lot of love. I’ve gone from having a high school crush on him to having him be my best friend in the world, to having him be in this tenuous, unnamed “thing” with me, to having him agree to be my boyfriend (despite the long distance), to being head-over-heels, ridiculous, let’s-get-married in love, to falling prey to the jealousies and insecurities of long distance, to being still so crazy about him every time he showed up at my door having flown cross-country and arriving with a dozen roses, to having him move in with me and my roommates in Queens and thinking we’d never have to be apart, to having him move back to L.A. and thinking I’d never forgive him or his parents for helping him move, to eight months of “open-ness,” of wanting to break up with him, of wanting to move on with my new Manhattan life in which I’d be wild and free in my dating, promiscuous of heart, to an eventual Memorial Day weekend spent on the west coast, in which, somehow, I fell completely head-over-heels back in love with him, as unguarded and wildly effusive as I’d been back in eleventh grade. Since May 2004, it’s been one slow and steady eventual plan to move beyond wanting to share our days to being able to share our lives, and our Tahitian engagement in February 2005 and my move west in December 2005 (despite the pressing reasons) have been the first steps of the journey.

I know I’ve bitched a LOT over the last two years about planning this wedding and budgeting for the projected invite list of 330+ now (so out of hand), but there is nothing I want more than to stand face-to-face with Dave and tell him how glad and lucky and certain I feel to have chosen to spend my life with him. I can’t imagine wanting anything more at that moment—except maybe to smash into his face with kisses.**

Happy seven years, David-who-never-reads-this-blog, and I wish us many happy more.


* Our teacher will here forth be called “V” to protect his identity and just in case I develop a retarded, adolescent minicrush on him.
** OK, I know, I know… too much. Go ahead, gag.