Now for something completely different....

My social life. I'm 50, divorced, and this year became an empty nester. A year and a half ago I joined a social group through meetup.com, which has greatly enhanced, errr, actually given me, a bit of a social life. One of the more frequent group activities is dancing. I am the first to admit that I can't dance. I've never been a dancer, despite taking lessons (ballroom, country swing, belly dance) over the years. I swear that I am rhythmicaly impaired and up until 18 months ago I was a complete and total dance-a-phobic.

A year ago in March the group went on a St. Patty's Day pub crawl. At the 3rd bar there was dancing. I got a drink, I chatted, I enviously watched the smiling people dancing and having fun, but I could not get up the nerve to join them. You know, because I can't dance, I look stupid, and am sure somehow everyone will be staring and laughing. All probably not exactly true, but it is what goes through the mind of a dance-a-phobic. At the next stop on the pub crawl there was more dancing, and it was here that I had an epiphany:

The only thing that could possibly by more awkward than my poor dancing abilities, was the fact that I was the only one standing on periphery not dancing.

I felt like a dork and finally stepped out onto the dance floor. And guess what? Nobody laughed. Not out loud at least. So now I go dancing. Nearly every week, and while I'm still not good at it, I have fun dancing with group at various places.

Last night we went someplace new, the Skybar. A nice place, with great views from up on the 13th floor of a downtown hotel. But the crowd was young, really young, mostly kids in their young 20's. My little group was mostly people over 40 so we may have been a bit out place, but we still danced and had fun.

My amusement for the evening was really kind of weird... the dance floor had disco lights which shined big, like 4 inch in diameter, colored spots on everything. The spots were even more interesting when they landed on some people, like the gal wearing the zebra striped mini skirt. Those zebra stripes were much more fun in all the pretty colors. The lights reminded me of the children's book "Put Me in the Zoo", that was all about polka dotted leopard who did amazing things with his colored spots and thought that was reason to be put in the zoo. It was a favorite book of mine and my kids. So as I a danced all I could think about was lines from the book... like.... "and now I put my spots on you!"

Silly I know, but my silly thoughts amused me all night... and I like being amused. I was also amused, after posting something about this on facebook, when a friend retorted "I think that book would hve been appropriate reading material for most of the people at that place last night."