One of the amazing results of this blog is the connections I’ve made with other ballroom dancers and bloggers. Last weekend, I got to make another one and meet Stefanie, the Beautiful Girl in the Ballroom!

She was going to be only about 1.5 hours away from me for the weekend and I wasn’t going to let the drive stop me, so we made plans to meet up on Saturday night. And it was such a great night!

We chatted over wine and a delicious spread of crackers, cheese and cherries (the Beautiful Girl is a beautiful host!). Bonus: Billy Joel was performing a concert nearby and we were close enough to hear the whole thing!

 

So while listening to “Piano Man” and “Only the Good Die Young,” we got to know more about each other. We marveled at the amazing personal transformations we have gone through, a lot of which were thanks to ballroom dance.

Ballroom Village members, your ears may have been burning because we talked about you too! We love this online community of ballroom bloggers! I’m so grateful to Stef for forming this group. Even though I don’t know you all personally, I feel so supported by the Village and my readers. I love following along on your ballroom journeys and I get excited to share my own!

I think part of it is I know you guys get it. Ballroom has so many unique challenges that can be hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced it themselves. D_Wall was just writing about this as he wondered how to answer the question “so how did you do?” in a recent post about his last ballroom event. Here, I can write about how frustrated I feel while trying to keep my lats down and my chest up, and I know someone somewhere will be nodding in agreement.

Us girls also talked about the people we meet who are excited about the idea of dancing, but always have a reason why they can’t do it. “I have no rhythm.” “I’m too fat.” “I’m too old.” “It’s too late for me to start.” “I’ll look stupid.”

It is the same conversation over and over. So many people with so many excuses!

And then the Beautiful Girl came up with a beautiful idea! Let’s change the conversation!

For every excuse, both of us had stories to share about ourselves or others, proving that excuse invalid. And we were sure the rest of the Ballroom Villagers would too!

So here is our proposal: a Ballroom Village anthology!

We’ll call it something like No More Excuses! Each chapter will represent an excuse and anyone interested will pick an excuse that they want to address and write that chapter. Or people can contribute to multiple chapters, if they wish! For example, I am living proof that “I’m too scared” is nonsense. I have plenty of personal stories where I was terrified to dance, even to the point of having an anxiety attack, but I did it anyway and was successful. So I could easily write a chapter on why being scared is no reason to not try dancing.

We all have those demons inside that tell us why we can’t do something. If we share our stories together with the world about how and why we do it anyway, maybe more people will realize their reasons for not dancing are just excuses and discover something amazing.

So what do you guys think?  Sound interesting?

Let me or Stef know if you want in!

Happy dancing!