Salsa and karma
Dedicated to all who ask what attracts me to salsa
On Tuesday, I walked up to a man and announced that I have been waiting to dance with him the whole night. And it wasn't a lie. I spotted him hours earlier - mid-fifties, curly hair, olive skin, dark jacket with a colorful handkerchief, impeccable style and subtle confidence.
He accepted my words with a dignified smile completely stripped of any inappropriate innuendos, which would be natural given my aggressive statement and the spatiotemporal zone - 9.30pm at Copacabana, a salsa club in midtown. We danced for about 20 minutes, I got my 'wow' moment and went home rather content.
Now let me back out and tell you why I go to salsa clubs. There are two main reasons: physical and intellectual. Physical part is easy: I hate gyms and salsa provides decent calisthenics. I’ve always had access to free gym through work and occasionally even forced myself to exercise. However, I am much better at forcing myself eat a cookie than to spend half hour on the treadmill. In the past 3 years, I have gone to the gym about ten times. Two of those times were post Sandy, when Jersey City was left without electricity and hot water. My office in Manhattan never lost power and I used the gym to take showers.
The intellectual reason for going to the club is a lot more elusive and perverse. I get indubitable pleasure from tampering with Darwin's laws. Latin clubs are petri dishes for natural selection. It's a jungle where male monkeys wear suits and female monkeys sport heals. The ones with the smoothest moves get the best partners.
As expected, most dancers land somewhere on the normal distribution curve with a small number of outliers, which are my favorite kind. There are two types of black swan dancers (sounds like a good book title... I should copyright it). The super good dancers, obviously, are always on the dance floor. The super bad dancers (newbies and shy guys) are usually standing by the bar consuming alcohol and hoping to learn dancing by osmosis.
This is where I give the proverbial middle finger to Darwin: I walk up and invite bad dancers to dance. Nicely. With a smile. Being all sensitive to their anxiety and awkward moves. I consider this my non-monetary charity work - trying to instill confidence and provide them with practice in an unstructured setting. By the time I part with them, I feel that my aura has lightened at least 3 shades and my karma has gone from good to very good. As an added bonus, bad dancers usually have great personalities/interesting jobs. Three months ago, I did some "charity" dancing with a non-invasive cardiologist. Around fifty. Single. Pleasant. Ladies, any takers? Happy to share his LinkedIn profile.
The black swans that are great dancers are also a dissonance to Darwin’s theories, but from the opposite perspective. Clearly, they have no shortage of women dancing with them. But now it’s me, a mediocre dancer, who is bravely accosting them and asking for an entry on their dance card.
And this is where Darwin (almost) wins. When I was 25 and approached great dancers, they always invited me to dance. No hesitation. Being 35, when I came up to a forty-something year old guy (who was clearly a good dancer), he looked me up and down, and with an attitude asked if I knew how to dance. For a second, I considered withdrawing with the tail between my legs, but then I remembered that I don't have a tail and responded with the same amount of attitude that he will have to dance with me to figure it out. I must have done OK, because the tough judge granted me a couple dances and even made a non-verbal invitation later in the night. But my pride was hurt and I decided to concentrate on great dancers that are 50+ and still find it fun to dance with me regardless of my level (see the first paragraph).
At the end of the day, I enhance my aura, progress karma and, hopefully, reduce my ass circumference. This is why I do it.