I was travelling down the road feeling hungry and cold...

I'm not a good dancer. I think I am. I really do. That is until I get on the dance floor.
In my mind this is how I'm moving....

Anybody else remember this one? I actually had this 45 (once again, for those of you under 30, ask your parents). These guys may not be the best dancers...but they are smooooth...and feeling it...and are having a good time. This is how I visualize myself feeling the music before I actually get up and go make my moves. Actually, if I was one of the Spinners (the Spinners are the band in the video, FYI), I'd probably be the one second in from the left, with the ill fitting pants and the vest that is a little bit tighter than everyone else's. Although, he does bust it out just after the 3:00 minute mark, when they pull the rubberbands out of their vest pockets.

Good times.

So what reminded me , once again, of my ineptitude on the dance floor was at my daughter's dance open house this past Saturday. The parents show up...watch the kids do the warm ups and some routines...they show us a performance they've been working on, then we all go home...oh, except sometimes the teacher gets the parents on to the floor to do some improvisation with the kiddos. Sometimes. This time I thought I was safe because my little swan attends another class (with the same teacher) earlier in the week and at that open house there was no parent dance. So I was safe.

Right?

Wrong!

So...It's not that I worry about the dancing (remember the whole stress angle in the armed robbery story)...I just know I suck. What makes it worse is I have to suck in front of my daughter, who is a good enough dancer to know what's good and what's not. Remember, I'm not.

Time to take the floor...and I bust out my best move. Unfortunately my best move is similar to the Elaine Benes "thumbs out, kick and jerk" move. If you need the visual, here it is...

Oh, and the beauty of this is that her teacher would occasionally stop the music, meaning you froze when the music stopped.

Awkward.

So, I'm up doing my thing, with my daughter, blocking everyone else out of the room, except for the two of us. That actually is the frame of mind I get into everytime I dance...sort of the turtle in the shell, ostrich with his head in the sand technique. "If I can't see them, they can't see me."

Then it hits me. My daughter doesn't care. She smiling, she's moving, she's spinning around...asking me to pick her up, to swing her around. She's reveling in my ineptitude. She's happy that I'm up there with her, not embarrassed by my Herman Munster ginourmous two left feet (Although I don't really have two left feet, I do have incredibly LARGE feet...size 13 or 14, depending on the shoe). She's not embarrassed now...at least not yet, that will come when she's a teenager, and she will be mortified by far more trivial things I do "to her" than dancing in an ill fashioned way. For now,she's just glad that her Dad is sharing with her something that she loves...and that's good enough for me.

She made me feel safe. She made me feel secure. I don't know if she knew, if she did she's brilliant, but either way, she did. Because of her I'm not Elaine dancing to Earth Wind and Fire, I'm Leo Sayer in Long Tall Glasses (note the title of this blog - the first line of this song), although with my shirt buttoned and no gold chain.

So, the moral of this story is a quote from Dr. Seuss...

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind

Love you too.