At the beginning of the night, the plan was to go to a basement party at a high school friend’s house. I knew that the Caribbean heat outside my Canadian door and the intoxicating dark rum in my cup from the islands called for a much more adventurous evening. We adorned skirts and dresses that moved with our hips and went to Calienté’s, the local Latin dance club.
“So, do you dance?” asked the latte-skinned bouncer. He had to talk-yell at me over the brassy Latin music that covered the club. “Do I dance? Yeah, I dance.” It was the first thing that came to my head and thus my lips, proving that I indeed do watch too many dance movies. Truth was, I took a few basic Mamba and Merengue classes with the boyfriend. But confidance is is all you need, right?
“So, are you going to dance with me?” Immediate reaction is to gauge whether doing so would anger boyfriend. Ladies, I live my own life, but there’s no sense doing something that hurts the boy that makes me happiest. Well, I was in a Latin club. My flock of friends had all paired off into the busy kaleidoscope of dancers. “Sure.”
The music was fast and the people around us moved acutely as they spun, dipped and shimmied. This was so my kind of place. I am difficult to lead, my boyfriend and dance instructor tell me, so I took this into consideration. Luckily, so did he as I miscounted beats and even stepped on his shoes once or twice. I cringed inside. Luckily the dark rum I’d been ingesting all night helepd me quickly forget how dorky I must have looked. After figuring out the beats, the song and the steps, I followed. I followed so easily that moving my right when he moved his left felt like nothing at all. I spun, he spun, He merengued, I merengued.
One song was enough, as he had to return to his bouncing duties. My feet killed, but my hips were in their Graceland. I desperately dragged my ladies out to dance with me, leading them through what I did know of Latin dancing. We all shimmied, we all dipped, spun and slow-quick-cha-cha-cha’d. The bottom layer of my hair was sticky and moist when we stepped out onto the pavement. The nigth air was about the same temperature as the dance floor. My skin was covered in dew and my flowing skirt threatened to fall off my hips under the weight of moisture. My calves told me they were tired, and my hips finally concurred.
We assembled and decided it was time to retire our lower halves to rest on my couch. I made an excuse to stay back and inhale, absorb the horns, the beats and the spilled drinks for another moment. It was like being on vacation down south where no one knew me, and the music was foreign to the usual drinking holes that offer beer and blast Rihanna. I bid adieu to my dance partner who, it turned out, was from Peru and invited me back again. We’ll see…