Tag: ballroom

Cha Cha – The Foxtrot of Rhythm

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If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know I have a love/hate relationship with foxtrot. I’m always just a little off in understanding that dance. Things never go quite right. Steps constantly elude me. It’s maddening.

At the same time, foxtrot seems so fun! The music, the slick moves, it reminds me of old Hollywood and great dancers like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. But for whatever reason, this cat isn’t so cool when she tries to foxtrot. Foxtrot is my ballroom nemesis.

Now it seems a new villain has come to town: cha cha.

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The Salsa Club

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My friend and I went to a bar/restaurant last night that has salsa and bachata dancing several nights a week. It had been about six months since the last time I went salsa dancing and boy, did I feel it! After one guy kept me on the dance floor for two songs in a row, I sat down and was ready to go to sleep about two minutes later. Granted, the songs were four or five minutes long! But still, I felt a little pathetic.

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Dancing with a Headache

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I’m one of those lucky people who gets frequent headaches. All sorts too!  Tension headaches, caffeine headaches, not-enough-sleep headaches, weather headaches, and even those extra special migraines. Thankfully, I don’t think they are considered “chronic” as in 15+ days per month, but they show up often enough that I buy my Excedrin at Costco (one of those bulk warehouse places for those unfamiliar).
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Do or do not, there is no try. Or is there?

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Happy Saturday everyone! If you recall, during my dance lesson on Wednesday, I was super self-critical. I couldn’t do anything right, and every compliment Teacher gave me was drowned out by the negative noise in my head. After reflecting on the lesson, I realized I was letting my demons get the best of me again and resolved to go into Friday’s lesson with a different attitude. So I made some commitments to myself.

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Commitments for My Next Lesson

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As usual, I did a lot of reflecting on the drive home from my lesson today. We did more rumba and cha cha. I’m finally getting a hang of the routines, but I still feel like all of my technique goes out the window when I try to dance them to music. Looking back on it a couple hours later, I guess I actually did pretty well. Teacher asked me to try a few things to work on my technique and I did them successfully (after a few tries). But it was one of those lessons where every little mistake outweighed every large success.

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Real Dancers Can Do Splits

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I’ve been itching for a new blog post topic, but my dancing has been limited lately. It’s hard to write about dancing when you’re not doing much of it! For awhile, I was dancing four days a week between private lessons with Teacher and Teacher’s friend and Teacher’s group class. So spoiled! But right now it’s just my private lessons twice a week with Teacher. Rhythm is progressing painfully slowly (at least to me), but there are “clicks” here and there. Teacher even did a little celebratory jig over my rumba during our last lesson. And we finally went through the swing routine. Only two dances to go!

This post was inspired by something other than my reduced dancing schedule though. I saw this article on Facebook about ballroom not being thought of as an expressive dance and it reminded me of something that occasionally bugs me, like a little burr in the back of my brain.

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Only Five Days Left!

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Hello everyone!

Just a reminder that Dance Diaries: Learning Ballroom Dance is free to download on Story Cartel’s website for only five more days!

You may as well download it now before you forget.

Another reminder: if you post a review about the book by June 6, you’ll be entered to win an advanced copy of the next one, Dance Diaries: Ballroom Budgeting! This second installment of the Dance Diaries series includes all of my secrets, tips and tricks to how I afford to dance while living paycheck to paycheck AND paying down debt. AND it comes with a bonus, but I’m not going to tell you what it is yet!

You can post a review of Dance Diaries: Learning Ballroom Dance on the website of your choosing. Here are the links to a few possibilities:

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Goodreads

Just be sure to copy the URL of your review onto your Story Cartel dashboard so it’s counted in the drawing!

Good luck and happy dancing!

 

Why DWTS Makes Me Cry

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The final for Dancing with the Stars is today! Has anyone else been watching? I’ve been routing for Nyle DiMarco, the last winner of America’s Next Top Model who happens to be deaf. He seems fearless in his pursuits, and it’s so inspiring. Every time I watch him just go for it, I always think “what the hell is my problem? I need to stop being so scared!”
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