No group dance class tonight, for some reason. We practiced a whole bunch of moves Tuesday night when nobody else showed up for the group lesson, so Mr. Park turned the night into an extended private lesson, starting with waltz. If I remember right, we worked mostly on style, although My Darling B would be the best one to ask about that because she’s taking notes now. She thinks that’ll help us remember the steps we’ve already learned. We’re always asking each other, “What new steps did we learn when we did this last week?” and I hardly ever remember until we start dancing. My muscles have better memory than I do.
The trouble with taking notes is, you have to know what the dance steps are called, and even when we can remember the steps, we have no recollection at all of what they’re called. Mr. Park will ask us to do a fifth-position overhand leaping leaf-spring extensor developay and I’ll look at B for a clue, but she’ll just frown at me and we’ll have to wait for Mr. Park to give us a little demonstration, whereupon a dim bulb will go on over both our heads. “Oh! That one!” we’ll cry in unison, and do it right away. But name them, we can’t.
So B has a notebook filled with made-up names for the dance steps we’ve learned, like “left underarm twirly thing” or “traveling too fast left box.” It would be a lot of fun to hand it to a professional and ask him to perform as many steps as he can possibly figure out. I have no idea how likely it is this will help us remember what we’ve learned, but at least we’ll have mildly amusing names we can use in class that will confuse the hell out of the instructor, instead of the other way around.
This Is Drivel 