She Dances

This story began, as most stories do, a long time ago, but not so far away. A friend suggested that the very thing needed to take away the long, slow, quiet evenings of winter weekends just might be International Folk Dance. Now, this quilter/birder had never before thought about such a thing, but ever the intrepid explorer, she thought she might just give it a try. So, she took herself across town one Saturday night and signed up for a beginner dance class. Little did she know that the world as she knew it was about to change - - for the better.

No more Saturday night doldrums. In fact, the problem soon became the appalling lack of Saturdays in each year. The Albuquerque International Folk dance community warmly welcomed the newcomer, and ensured that her feet would become nimble (or at least less clumsy!) and that one day, the novice dancer would go away to a camp for the express purpose of learning new dances from foreign lands. The camper just returned from that remarkable weekend, where she learned two new types of dances, Turkish, and Latin with Jim D'Apice and Jodi Fleischman.

Typical of a camper (remember your childhood), the novice danced her feet and legs to exhaustion, ate too much good food, laughed and visited with folks from throughout the U.S., and slept little as parties went on into the wee hours of the morn. So, packing up might have been a breeze, had not the lack of sleep affected the thought processes. It was only 24 hours later that she realized that she had left her party clothes neatly hanging the closet at camp. Perhaps her daughter will not read this post, which would be a good thing. When that little miss went off to her first camp at the tender age of 8, she also returned home sans camp clothing. Ah, the irony of it all!