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For almost twenty-three years of my life I believed that I was a very good dancer. Yesterday I found out that I was way wrong.
I’ve recently discovered that there are three types of males:
TYPE ONE: Males who refuse to dance, no matter what the circumstances. These men know how bad they are at dancing and they know that one step under the disco ball will illuminate their awkwardness. Although it might be mildly embarrassing to watch the rest of the party dance without you, Type One males know that mild embarrassment is tolerable. What isn’t tolerable is the shame that comes from a disastrous dancing exhibition. Type One males are predominantly white.
TYPE TWO: Males who are very good at dancing. Those of us who are not Type Twos do not like the Type Twos. They have an immeasurable advantage over us when it comes to tossing game at the ladies, and this is why we’ve tried so hard to spread the rumor that most good dancers are gay. Any member of a boy band? Gay. Michael Jackson? Gay (with little kids). Arnold Schwarzenegger in the tango scenes of True Lies? Gay (or at least the body double was).
TYPE THREE: Males who are not good at dancing, but secretly think that they’re good when they’re drunk. This is the most dangerous form of male dancer. They’re the ones at the clubs that come barging ass-first into women like grizzly bears on ecstasy. They literally march to the beat of their own drums. And it’s a very loud drum with a very irregular rhythm. Yet these men actually think that alcohol has the ability to magically unlock a usually dormant knack for cutting rug like Usher (who is almost definitely gay).
I am a Type Three dancer. I just found this out yesterday. I didn’t even know there were three types of dancers until yesterday. Before then, there were just two kinds – good and bad. And I was definitely a good dancer. When I was drunk.
But then the hip hop instructor arrived and ruined everything.
I should explain that I’m working five days a week this summer as a counselor at a morning camp for 6-14 year-olds. On most days I play knockout or go to art shack to draw gender-confused platypuses named Duke Mary St. Croix III (if you ever visit the camp, the drawing is on your right as you enter the art shack. You can’t miss it. Duke is the yellow platypus with an orange Mohawk, chest hair, a tank top, and bikini bottoms.) Yesterday, however, we had a visiting hip hop instructor. He was a Type Two named Kelly. Alas, I’ve done my research and it turns out that he’s not gay, which sucks for us Type Ones and Threes.
But let’s go back to yesterday morning when I wasn’t a Type Three – I still thought of myself as a good dancer – and I mindlessly wandered into the dance clinic. I observed the campers, who were predominantly eight-year-old girls, for a few minutes and then decided that I should give it a shot.
Let’s remember that I was NOT DRUNK. Of course I wasn’t. Drunk and stupid is no way to go through a morning as a camp counselor, so I prefer to just be stupid. But because I’m stupid, I thought that it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t drunk. This is the problem with Type Threes. We don’t just think that we’re good when we’re sufficiently drunk. We think we’re ALWAYS good – it just takes a little Red Bull and vodka to unleash the dancing ability. So I figured I could just waltz onto the dance floor with Kelly and the girls and let my natural abilities take over. This was probably the first time I had danced sober since high school. In high school, my dance moves were never very good, but I always thought it was because I was too preoccupied with trying to maneuver my boner away from my partner.
It didn’t take long to find out that I suck at dancing. Kelly was teaching us a maneuver called (I think) the heel-toe twist. This is a pretty rudimentary move. You put your left foot forward, with your toe up, weight on the heel. You lift your right heel up. You twist to your right. Then you switch feet – the left one goes back and the right one goes forward – and you twist to your left. Sounds simple, but I managed to look like a drunk gorilla taking a sobriety test.
While plodding around like a drunk gorilla, I was also sweating like a fat pizza chef. I was way bigger than my fellow dance classmates – most of their ponytails were at my waist – but they were way better at dancing. They all figured out the back slide before I did. The back slide is kind of like the moonwalk. Actually it’s exactly like the moonwalk, but Kelly calls it the back slide so I’m calling it the back slide. It’s about 17,000 times harder than it looks. Kelly had to stop the class several times to give me individual back sliding instruction. Once, after I almost fell over, he told me that I was THIS close.
Yesterday evening I told La Girlfriend that I was learning how to back slide.
“It’s kind of like the moon walk,” I said.
“Yeah, I know how to do it,” she said.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Yeah, right. Try to explain how to do it and I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong.”
She then explained exactly how to do the back slide. You lift your back heel and put all your weight on that foot. Then you drag your front foot back, keeping your leg straight. I know it sounds easy, but it’s almost impossible if you have tight Achilles tendons like I do. I asked La Girlfriend where she learned how to back slide and she said she’d been taught when she was eight. She learned at a camp.
Maybe it’s too late for me to learn. I’ll probably be a Type Three for the rest of my life, but if I were smart, I’d become a Type One and stick to the sidelines. Or maybe I can work really hard, dedicate myself to the back slide, and turn myself into a Type Two some day.
The next dance class is tomorrow. Gotta go practice.
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adam@theadamwhite.com |
