Channeling my inner Zumba hip-hop dancer

If I could be anything in the whole wide world, skills be damned, I’d write books and work from home. But after that, I’d be a dancer. On tour with some famous singer. With outfits that twirled when I spun around.

Seriously: I love dancing. Love, love it.

This is a recent thing for me. I never took dance classes as a kid — I was more into soccer and track and cross country — but last year in Dallas, I took a burlesque dancing class and had a fantastic time. A few months later I took an aerobics class that mixed elements of hip-hop and adored that, too. My dance-love really cemented a few weeks ago, though, when I started going to hip-hop and Zumba classes at the gym a few doors down.

The teacher, an Afro-Latina woman with braids, is ripped. She hops in the air like she has springs in her shoes. (It’s probably her abs of steel.) She yells out the counts in this high-pitched, militarist voice: “Unooooo! Doooooos! Treeeeees!” And we all flop around and try to follow her.

I discovered that I’m not that bad. My arms and hips can actually move in the way I want them to. Moreover, it’s actually fun to kick my feet out in a pseudo-attempt at a quebradita dance, and to pitch my hips left and right in a merengue. (I think this is my inner Jennifer Grey coming out.) Plus it’s an amazing workout. By the end of the class, I’m ready to collapse onto my sofa with a big glass of water. But proudly.

Last week’s hip-hop class was the most fun yet. We learned a real routine — which called for flinging ourselves delicately on the floor! — and we performed it to some late-nineties pop song. (Teach needs help selecting the hip-hop tunes.) She’d scrutinize each of us as the music played, making sure we hit the steps correctly. This sounds cheesy, but I felt like I was rehearsing for a show or something, and that maybe in some alternate universe I was a real dancer. I’d be the girl who got started late in life, who always showed up to class in the same ratty tennis shoes; she’d be the critical teacher who expected the best from her students, and pounded a cane on the floor.

Of course none of that will ever happen, first of all because she doesn’t have a cane. And my tennis shoes aren’t that bad. Still, it’s nice to dream while I’m huffing and puffing.

The next class is tomorrow. I think I will get some new shoes, because my old ones haven’t been so easy on my knees. The last thing I want to do is start talking glucosamine-chondroitin just because I wanna dance.