Salsa
I found a salsa event on the Internet – free lessons, free dancing and five dollar margaritas. I wanted to bring some friends of mine, but they couldn’t make it, which I later learned is a common thing with dance events. The club/lounge/whatever was on Bowery, near where my friends and I celebrated my friend’s Halloween birthday, so I wasn’t entirely lost.
I entered the dark club and was immediately greeted by a charmingly effusive event planner. I assume she sets up the meetings on that site, talks to the bar and coordinates the whole thing. I wanted to be an event planner for a while, it’s a nicely social bit of work (if stressful). I can only imagine that the bar allowed her to use the space for free if she could promise that a certain amount of drinks would be sold, and I’m pretty sure any threshold would be met. Drinks were in full force that night, from bright blue margaritas to dusky pink cosmopolitans. The crowd was surprisingly mixed in age, gender, race and whatever demographic spectra you can think of.
The night began with a free lesson, which is when I realized that tonight might be a problem. See, there are two kinds of Salsa, one and two. I had some training in two, but the dancing that day would be one. I was actually in a worse place than someone without lessons, since I had all of these habits and muscle memory things that would work against me. Eventually, I just danced the kind of salsa I knew. I met some pretty cool people at that club, one of which said that she was planning to bring several of her friends, who ended up not going. Oh well.