Wisdom from the Dancefloor

After attending three social dancing events, (prom twice and homecoming once), I wanted to share with you some tidbits of dance floor knowledge that I have gathered. Since they may include stories, I'll be posting them one at a time. Hopefully these will help you to enhance your enjoyment while you are "breaking it down" (that's homeschool for conservatively dancing when you are trying to avoid any other slang usage)at your next dance.

1. Wear comfortable shoes. While this may seem like a given, I really encourage you to take your time in choosing your shoe. Especially and mostly if you are a girl. Illustration: I wore some three or four inch silver spiked heels to prom two nights ago. They were fairly simple, and mostly comfortable to dance in. But, like most of the girls, about halfway through the instructed dancing (way before free dance even thought about starting) I kicked off my heels on the side of the dance floor. We were in the middle of learning a line dance when all of a sudden the dance instructor decided to start giving a speech on being barefoot while dancing, and how unheard of it was in his day to even think about losing your shoes. I was on the front row with my partner, right in front of the instructor. You can imagine my shock when in the middle of his rant, he stopped, bent down, and picked up a pair of silver heels. My heels. At this moment, I shrunk about a foot to hid my bare feet, causing my partner to give me a double-take glance as I was motioning to him to keep quiet, making him snicker, which caused me to laugh even more. While this was going on, the instructor waved my shoes about and said "And this is even worse! Cinderella has left her slippers!" which caused even more laughter about the floor. The dance instructor never found out whose shoes they were (or at least he acted like he didn't know), and after about an hour, I (not Prince Charming) went and removed my shoes from that spot, long after the teacher had left. Apparently it is good etiquette to keep your shoes on your feet.

One more good thing that can come of this is that if you ladies do wear heels, keeping them on will allow you to look your guy in the eye (or at least get closer to it than you were before). This doesn't bother me too much (if it did, my shoes would have stayed on the whole time). But I know some of you don't like being smaller, so I thought I would throw it out there anyways.

Having said all of that, I hope that you will take extra time in choosing your next pair of shoes. In doing so, you will be able to follow dance floor protocol, keep confident on the floor, and hopefully avoid any Cinderella moments :)

-Paige



PS: The picture above is the Maidenology group before prom on Friday night. As soon as I have pictures from the dancing, I will put them in my web albums for viewing. Keep checking!