Remember My Name

Oh ye gads (as they say in Oz)! I've just realised I completely omitted to title my last 2 blog posts, which is very sloppy work indeed and simply won't do. So I've gone back and given them shiny new titles - hope you like them. Now what to call this one....

I don't mean to turn this into a blog about dancing but I do feel compelled to write about last night's class. It was just Janine this time as Avis was away ("working" or some such excuse) and, to quote the Blockbuster Video jingle, Wow what a difference! Her teaching style is so much better, although I can't quite put my finger on why. I think it all comes down to confidence and good time management. Avis seems to want to put music to every warm-up exercise, which involves teaching us the move, practising it, then doing it with the music (just for warm-ups!), and she also says things like "Is that kind of ok with everyone? Have you sort of got that?" after every move. So the warm-ups take about 45 minutes leaving us only 15 minutes actual dance time.

However, Janine seemed much more confident in her approach and got us doing completely different exercises, more in tune with what I consider the classic image of a dance class, i.e. leaping and jumping across the room in pairs as if we were in Fame! One such exercise involved us imagining we were in a low tunnel, so we had to move across the floor in as many ways as we could think of without standing up. I felt like a swimmer, a gymnast and a slug all rolled into one. We also had more time to build on our little sequence, involving us all coming together in a big circle and doing some hokey cokeyesque moves, plus a great hip sliding floor move at the end which is definitely straight out of Fame.

In other news, my best achievement of the week, or rather month - I wrote a song! Yes, my first ever actual song. I'm so chuffed. I borrowed a friend's keyboard and to my great surprise I discovered I've actually retained some of the Grade 2 piano skills I learnt 20 years ago. Clever little brain. Yesterday I had a meeting with a guy I'm doing a skill swap with to work out what our 4 sessions of vocal and songwriting coaching should cover. So watch this space (or should that be listen to this space?) Anyway I'm dead excited. Yay!

P.S. Did you see what I did there with the title? It's a lyric from the Fame theme tune you see, but it's also a reference to forgetting to title my posts. See? Clever, huh?