Shakin' what your mama gave ya

Marsha just called my attention to this, and so I'm sharing.... I've talked about The Electric Cowboy before, and although the place does get very crowded and inconducive to actual dancing late in the evenings of a weekend (after about 11:30 pretty much), it's a great floor and venue for dancing otherwise up til then (despite the name, it's not strictly "cowboy" -- they alternate sets between country music, which is often wonderfully danceable, and contemporary) which is roughly when we take off and the dance floor fills up with what we call "tennis shoe dancers and arm wavers" (not that there's anything wrong with that, but they tend to take their drinks on the floor with them by then too, which is just urggghhh). This Saturday some guy showed up with some very serious camera equipment and started following us around on the dance floor. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on, just that some flash was going on at the periphery of my vision. And then once a dance was over, he came over and asked if we'd sign for permission to use the photos. Which we did, figuring it was going up on their web site.

Then Marsha scared me to death by saying there we were, on Lousville metromix.... For some reason I can't upload photos here anymore, so here's a link to my copy of it on facebook,...

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3 ... 1493105474

...and which wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared it might be.... So, anyway, for anybody who's interested, as I've mentioned before, it's a nice floor. Gary and I are there every other Saturday, pretty much, and we'd love to see some food forumites some time. Good time, not great beer,... and they also have pool tables,... but we're there for the dancing!

I think it's so cute and awesome that you guys go out dancing together. Great picture.

Another link, to the metromix site, and other pics from the evening....

http://louisville.metromix.com/bars-and ... 44/content

We're photo #13 in that slide show....

http://louisville.metromix.com/bars-and ... t?photo=13

I hestitate to include the whole shebang because although those pics ARE representative of the place very late in the evening, it's very different early. The photo of me and Gary is more the sort of thing we prefer.... Room to dance, nobody out on the floor with their drinks, etc. The bar maids do wear exceedingly skimpy outfits, but what the heck. They're very lovely and sweet, and it's a nice place, everybody's polite and accommodating. You can request music.

I think it's so cute and awesome that you guys go out dancing together. Great picture.

We started taking dance lessons in Chicago, just a few months before we moved. Started with standard ballroom lessons, which generally start you out with East Coast Swing. So we did that for a few lessons, practicing like mad, and then we moved down to Fort Smith, Arkansas, which surprised us by having a really strong dance community. And it turned out that one of Gary's colleagues and his wife were serious dancers and they introduced us to other dancers and so we were dancing three and sometimes four times a week. There's an Electric Cowboy in Fort Smith too. It's a chain, and they do a nice job. We learned some two-step, but triple-step (otherwise known as swing on the move) is big down there, and we learned that in a big way. And then we started focusing especially on West Coast Swing and and Night Club Two Step, which isn't country or anything like two-step, but a beautiful, romantic sort of thing akin to ballroom bolero. We couldn't find a decent place here for a long time, and so we've only really started up dancing again in a more concentrated way. We practice! There are lots of ways to learn how to dance. Dance tapes, for example, and we've learned a lot with those.

Here's the sort of thing we're concentrating on now.... Here are two of the best West Coast Swing dancers in the world right now, Melissa Rutz and Arjay Centeno:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3VJxLcerxM

These two are awesome. Rutz has been dancing since she was four, San Francisco School of Ballet, etc., and they're what we watch to get inspired. Here's another, Jason Colacino, who's just fabulous, and, uh, well, adorable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3VJxLcerxM

Dancing With the Stars added some quasi-ballroom and West Coast Swing to their dances last season, and it became clear pretty fast that West Coast Swing is impossible to learn that quickly. It's one of the most complex dance forms ever. It's a real challenge, and we love it.