Thirteen more things about me...

1. I love to dance. Tap, ballet, jazz, ballroom, country-western, line dance, polka, squaredance, you name it; if there's a beat you can move to, I'm loving it. I intend to learn Irish step dance and join a Tapping Grannies group when I retire or quit traveling, whichever comes first.

2. When I was little, although my dreams were of being dressed in tutu and tiara and floating en pointe across the stage, my actual talent was tap. I was limber, high energy, and a bit of a showoff. (Okay, a lot of a showoff.) I had a tap solo in the recital every year, and sometimes an additional duet with the instructor. He was very tall, and those routines always ended with me standing on his shoulders or his hands. I was grown with children of my own before my mother told me that she was never charged for my dance lessons. The school said I was such good publicity for them, it was a fair trade.

3. At some point I changed my ambition from prima ballerina to Rockette. The fact that I was never going to be 5'8" did not enter my head. Then we moved from New York to Texas. There was no dance studio within walking distance of our new house, and my mother did not drive. That's how casually and abruptly dreams can end. I danced every day, by myself, until I outgrew my tap shoes.

4. My father looked good on a dance floor, but he did not lead. He would swoop and twirl and change direction with no warning. Nonetheless, he decided that he would teach me how to dance. I learned to sense the slightest shift in his balance. Once I could follow him, I could follow anyone. I guess he did me a favor, though he would have been surprised by the mechanism.

5. I took up dance again when my daughters took gymnastics at a dance studio. I kept it up, even teaching a couple of classes, until I went on the road. I also put on 20 pounds in my first six months of traveling, the result of no more exercise.

6. In a ballet class, one of the women looked so familiar, but I just couldn't place her. "Do I know you from PTA meetings?" I asked. "From the grocery store?" She replied, rather coldly I thought, "I'm your doctor." Okay, lady, don't get your leotard in a wad, I never had a dance class with my doctor before!

7. In the movie Flashdance, the heroine talks about how she sometimes longs to get up on stage so she can disappear. I have a different experience. There is somebody inside me who only exists when I dance. I don't disappear when I dance; that's when I'm complete.

8. I didn't learn how to ski until I was past 40, and I was stiff and awkward and trying to control everything instead of moving with the mountain. Then the Professor skiied up behind me and said "It's like dancing." That was all it took. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from an expert skiier, but I do okay, I enjoy it, and now that I imagine myself dancing down the mountain, I no longer look like Al Gore giving a speech.

9. Oddly, the Professor, who is graceful on the slopes, was wooden on the dance floor until, taking my cue from him, I whispered "It's like skiing." There was an instant change in him, as well.

10. You'd think I would have fallen in love with another avid dancer, but somehow, I never had any chemistry with them.

11. Once when two of my granddaughters were spending the night and it was raining, barely misting,really, we went outside and did sashays down the street, while we twirled our umbrellas and sang a few choruses of "Singing in the Rain." I think they both still remember that. I know it's one of my favorite memories.

12. In my youth,musicals were THE art form in movies. I honestly thought that dates ended this way: he would do a little dance step, I would do a little dance step of my own, we would do a tentative step together and then we would launch into a glorious routine, which would include jumping over trash cans, running up walls, and twirling around lampposts. For a long time, I couldn't figure out how we would both know the same routine, but then it came to me -- if we both did the same steps from the heart, it was a sign of True Love. That love would be so powerful that it would flow right into the milkman, the policeman, and the other assorted people who showed up to sing background music while we danced. It was about as disappointing to discover that dates did not end this way as it was to find out that there was no Santa Claus.

13. Somewhere around middle school-ish age, a friend and I were dancing one afternoon. He twirled me around, spun me out, and as I turned back to him I grabbed his hand. Only it wasn't his hand. He got the oddest look on his face, I realized just what I had grabbed, and we both collapsed, literally in convulsions of laughter. Several minutes later, when we could breathe again, I gasped "You know what I thought? --gee, his hand is so soft". That set us off again. To this day, I have never laughed that hard, and I'm laughing again as I type this.

So there you are, 13 things about dancing. Who knew there was that much to say about it? I love dancing so much, I could probably do three more posts about it -- but I promise I won't.