Cha Cha

Jean and I have been practicing nearly every day for our cha-cha class. It's lucky for me that Jean has a sense of humor, since I still stumble despite all the practice. I think I've improved some, but I doubt I'll ever go beyond a basic competency.

Last Tuesday was our second class, and I was so befuddled by what the instructors were trying to teach, that I ended up standing on the sidelines while just about everyone else danced. No matter how closely I watched, I wasn't able to pick apart the steps well enough to replicate them, or even imitate them loosely. I was very frustrated. The instructors seem more intent on moving the mid-level dancers forward than helping the hopeless clutzes, and I guess I can't blame them.

We've 'learned' two dances, the Travelling Cha-cha, and the Southern Nights Cha-cha. Jean grabbed another one off the Internet, the Western Lights Cha-cha, and we've been practicing it on our own. Learning a dance step is for me a lot like solving a bug in my product at work. I have to create a model for what I think is happening, and then try to prove it. In this case, I guess the bug is in me, and by modelling the patterns in the dance, I hope to fix the bug in my ineptness. It was just today, after working through the Western Lights for the umpteenth time, that I recognized a symmetry patttern that'd been there all along. It took me days to see it.

Like anything I try to learn, I find the topic coloring other areas of my perception. I've begun to see my music collection in binary: songs that are good for cha-cha, and songs that aren't. Most of my collection isn't cha-cha material. Yesterday I said to Jean that I thought the old song Third Rate Romance would be a good cha-cha song. I ended up hunting down a CD of songs by the Amazing Rhythm Aces (since iTunes Music Store doesn't carry them -- yet) and bought it today. I've got to get the old CD player set up in the basement again so we can practice to it.

We've got one more evening to practice, then it's back to Tuesday night Cha-cha class, for another round of confusion and humiliation. Wish me luck!