I Went Contra Dancing?

Last week I took a trip to Asheville NC for a studio photo shoot. I was traveling with one of the marketing analysts from my client. He’s one year out of college (early 20s). He told me that his sister was driving up from Greenville SC to go contra dancing, and he was planning on going too.

He asked me to go, and I decided that I would. I told him that at this point in my life, with all that is going on, I needed to do things to become more social. I also told him that normally, I would not have gone. But we figured that even if I didn’t enjoy it, it was a good way to kill a couple of hours rather than sitting in a hotel room.

Dancing is not my thing, and I haven’t danced hardly at all since college formals, and before that, contemporary bar mitzvahs. So the thought of spending a couple hours dancing didn’t really appeal to me. And then there was that 8th grade dance thing of all the boys on one side of the gym and all the girls on the other. We are all adults and this should not be that difficult. As it turns out, one of the tenets of contra dancing is that one dances with a different partner every dance. This means people are constantly shifting around and looking for new partners. As it turned out, every time I danced, a woman asked me to dance. If I attend another dance, as there are plenty in this area, I will have to be more confident and ask someone to dance. It was actually nothing like 8th grade.