May I please have this faux pas?

Ever since the Hero and I took ballroom dancing lessons a few years ago, he has been on the lookout for both place and opportunity to practice our budding skills. By "practice" I mean "expose our ineptitude to the world."

We took these lessons thanks to Groupon, which is a service that, by offering deeply discounted coupons to gazillions of people, emboldens those people to do inadvisable things like take dance lessons even when their talent for dancing is less than zero.

The great thing about Groupon, though, is that even if you have a terrible experience at whatever you're using the coupon for, at least you didn't pay full price. So perhaps you got food poisoning at a restaurant or broke your leg skeet shooting, but hey, it could have cost a lot more.

The dance lessons, however, turned out to be a very nice experience. We actually learned several things about dancing, most of which I promptly forgot, but we did remember the most important thing: Once our lessons ended, we should never, ever try dancing in public again.

At least, that is what I remember from the experience. But the Hero has insisted, ever since, that we should keep up our skills, and that it would be fun to go somewhere on a special occasion and kick up our heels. And try not to cause anyone bodily harm.

A fine opportunity to embarrass ourselves came on our recent trip to the beach, where we ate lunch across the street from the town's Convention Hall one day. A sign above the door flashed all the upcoming events, like "Off-Season Subpar Band I, Off-Season Subpar Band II," etc. The Hero, studying the messages intently (possibly hoping to see the screen flash "Musician needed immediately to fill in on keyboards for Aug. 30. Prefer Maryland male, 40s, who is also a whiz computer guy"), suddenly said, "Hey, they have ballroom dancing! Tonight!"

I was pretty sure I was going to be unwell that night, and said so, but the Hero was resolute.

"I'm sure there'll be a dress code," I said.

"Let's go over and check it out," he said.

We did, and asked the woman behind the counter if there was a dress code for the dancing. She assured us there was not. Was she deliberately ignoring the vigorous nodding of my head as I stood behind the Hero? It was hard to tell.

We came back promptly at 9:00 that night, and promptly panicked. Well, the Hero panicked. I had been practicing panicking since the moment we'd -- he'd -- decided to come, so I was in good shape as far as panicking.

Everyone else knew each other. They chatted about how this was the last session of the summer. They had all been doing this, together, the whole summer.


When the first dance began, neither of us moved, even though it was a foxtrot, a dance we know. The second dance was also a foxtrot, and still we sat unmoving. 

But when the third dance was imminent, the Hero reached over to pry me from my death grip on the chair. And then the DJ announced that this would be a salsa. 

We looked at each other, stunned. We didn't know the salsa. In fact, thanks to the limits of the Groupon we had used, we knew only two dances.* Had we really thought there would be only foxtrots and waltzes all evening?**

We sat out the next dance, too, which was a swing. I began to relax. Maybe we'll just sit here and watch all night, I thought.

But finally a waltz came, and away we went. While the other couples swirled around the room, we stayed in our neat little box, as we had been taught. Occasionally we switched it up to the point where we traveled a foot or two and made another little box. Up and down the left side of the room, we established a series of little boxes and waltzed them to death.

The band seemed to catch on that we didn't know much beyond the waltz, and they -- quick-thinking as they were -- played several other dances after that, none of which we knew Then a foxtrot came, and we were on our feet again, ready to take this song by storm.

Except that we couldn't quite sort out the foxtrot steps from the waltz steps, and settled for something we shall call the waltztrot. It resembled those scenes in comic films where two people politely try to get around each other but keep trying to occupy the same space at the same time. We even tried -- though this was not on purpose -- to occupy the same space as some of the other couples. This effort was not successful.

Thankfully, modern technology came to our rescue. The band mercifully took a break, and the Hero and I frantically Googled "foxtrot steps for Dummies." There we learned that we had been forgetting that the steps are "slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, slow, quick, quick," etc.

Our memories refreshed, we tried again when the next foxtrot was played -- the band must have forgotten during the break that this was one we would attempt -- but kept missing one particular step. Instead of "slow, slow, quick, quick," our sequence was more "slow, slow, oof, ouch, slow, slow..."

"Your right foot has to move back, not forward," I said. Unfortunately I said this while looking down, and the Hero responded by looking down, and to accompany our dance steps we added "BONK, ow!" mid-sequence.

We never did make it to the other side of the room, although once we flirted dangerously with the middle. We gradually noticed, however, that there were only a few couples on the floor, leaving us rather conspicuously out in the open, whereupon we hastily waltztrotted back to the safety of our original box.

No one spoke to us for most of the evening, for which we could not blame them. We probably wouldn't have either if we hadn't been us. One couple did come to sit at our table toward the end of the evening. "They probably drew the short straw," I whispered to the Hero as we saw them approach. "Everyone must have drawn straws to see who would be the unlucky ones to come over and see why we thought it was a good idea to come here tonight."

Eventually the misery ended -- here I am speaking of the misery everyone else endured while watching us -- and we left hurriedly. 

And, fortunately, managed not to trip down the stairs on our way out.

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*Actually, as we would discover later in the evening, we were wrong about this. We knew only ONE dance.

**Yes, apparently we had.