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Two Weeks Without Dancing

By Alexzandra Enger

There’s never been a time in my life when I’ve gone longer than a week without engaging in some form of dance. My first steps literally took place in soft, pink, leather ballet shoes, and three years after that, a pair of toddler-sized tap shoes arrived in the mail, special delivery. As the daughter of a professional ballet instructor, I was never really given the opportunity to not dance. I was a dancer, born and bred; it was in my blood. I’d had certain expectations when I moved away from home to the Twin Cities, one of which was to be dancing significantly less. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Ballroom dance quickly consumed all my free time, so when I went to South Dakota to visit some family for two weeks, I was in for an unusually dance-void time.

When I can’t practice with my partner, team, or the club, I seek out social dances. My first three options were several hundred miles away from me, so in this city that my immediate family once called home, I resorted to looking for studios, community centers, and local clubs that hosted ballroom social dances. My cursory internet investigation proved fruitless and disappointing, and a secondary search through the newspapers yielded similarly dull results. It seemed that my two weeks would be spent in a ballroom purgatory. There were dance studios there, of course. In younger years, I would spend summers studying ballet and taking exams to earn my certifications. If tap, modern, or jazz are things that tickle your fancy, you’d be in luck as well, but not if your preferred method of musical motion was of a slightly more systematic, partnership-based variety.

It seemed that I would be forced into using solo practice as my only physical connection to ballroom until it was time for me to return to my home in Saint Paul. Days passed slowly, hastened only by the brief periods of time when I could steal away and practice a few long walls. After fourteen days, or an eternity in time without dance, I boarded a plane to come home. My mother, the aforementioned ballet instructor, listened to my lamenting about a lack of ballroom during my stay. I heard her say something I wished had reached my ears when I had first gotten off the plane, not right before I was about to board my return flight: an old friend of hers had a small, not widely advertised ballroom studio just off Main Street. There was a twinge of disappointment in the back of my mind as I thought about all the missed opportunities, but as I was about to return to my own personal mini Mecca of ballroom, I knew that it wouldn’t do me much good to think too long or hard about it.

The plane ride went well; you may remember from my last musing on these pages that my first-ever flight was less than a month prior to this one, which was my fourth. I must admit, the takeoff and landing are still my favorite parts. I boarded the light rail after a quick jaunt across the terminal to the train platform, suitcase in tow, to head back to Saint Paul.

My first stop wasn’t home; I had a much better place to be. You might be able to guess where I was headed: a social dance.

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