The venue is kind of sketchy and hard to find.  It’s the furthest thing you can imagine from a fancy club like the Roxy, and more focused on just dancing.  It’s in Cambridge, in Central Square, on a side street, with almost no signs pointing the way.

They have lessons and dancing every Friday night.  Since becoming a better dancer is one of my new year’s resolutions for 2009, I imagine we’ll be coming back here for more.

The first lesson is an hour or so of casino rueda.  It was a lot of fun.  Fairly simple moves.  So simple that even I had no trouble with them, and most of my friends will attest that I’m not exactly the swaying type 😉  I’m sure there’s infinitely more advanced choreography to this style of dancing, and it would immediately elude me, but at least what we learned last night was cool.

The second lesson is an hour or so of basic salsa, with a different instructor.  This was a bit more challenging for me, so I kind of struggled through it and became frustrated a bit.  But with Alli’s encouragement, I came back and tried it out some more.  The end was gratifying, as we learned what at first looked like a very impressive advanced move.  But with patient instruction and repeating it like 50 times, we finally got decently close.

Then there’s just some loose, normal dancing, as one might expect.  At this point, unfortunately, the men to women ration in the club changes in a material way.  It seemed like about 20 guys joined in and stood on the side lines, which was intriguing.  During the lessons, the men – women ratio was about 1:1, which is ideal.  It’s funny how that works out.  And there were plenty of singles who came with friends, so it wasn’t all couples.

I wasn’t feeling that well all day (sore throat), and by this point in the night I was kind of worn out, so we left.

Nonetheless, a step forward, literally and figuratively, in realizing one new year’s resolution.  Probably not interesting to anyone but me, but then again, that has never been a filter in what I write 😉