Borneo was a working vacation. Thursday through Saturday, I attended a teachers’ conference. It was an excellent conference and I brought back a lot of ideas for my classroom. The last night of the conference, the organizers put on an evening of drinks, appetizers, and live music in the grand ballroom. It was quite an evening. After a week of discussion the relative merits of heterogeneous groupings versus homogenous groupings, nearly a thousand teachers from all over Southeast Asia let their hair down.
The live band found its groove and people took to the dance floor. I am not a big dancer. I lack rhythm. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s actually well documented. My kindergarten teacher Mrs. Ostdyk wrote on my report card, “The rhythmic element of music seems to elude Jack.”Not much has changed in the ensuing forty years.
But the live music and my wife’s cajoling proved to be too much for even me. Before I knew it, I found myself out on the parquet floor. It had been years since I had attempted to dance and I decided that it would be best for everyone involved if I tried to ease into it. Step to the left, swing the arms. Step to the right, swing the arms. Small movements, Jack, small movements.
I thought that –like riding a bike- it would all come right back to me. It didn’t. It was taking me a while to get my groove back.
I knew that I wasn’t doing so well, but I didn’t realize just how badly I was doing until a stranger intervened. A women I had never met before came up behind me, grabbed my elbows and started to swing my arms forwards and backwards yelling over the music, “It’s supposed be fun!”Well, would you mind telling that to my feet?
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