The Spice

Gary and I dance in lots of different venues; we like variety in all things: music, dance styles, environment, people, you name it. Some venues we attend specialize in a particular kind of dance and music, such as Latin, swing, or blues.

We experienced this at a new venue we tried this week, Smee’s in Indianapolis. Smee’s is a local restaurant with great food and atmosphere. They have an adjoining room with a nice wood dance floor that they allow one of the west coast swing clubs in town to use for free, hoping dancers will eat and drink at their establishment, which we did.

The music started promptly at 7 o’clock. The selection was good… slow and funky. Perfect for a slower version of WCS. We danced a rumba or two, a cha-cha, and ECS, but really, the music was better suited for bluesy WCS. All of it.

We love WCS and it’s one of our fave dances, but after an hour or so we were jonesing for some real Latin, a snappy ECS number, or faster WCS music. Even our beloved Terry Lee mixes up the ‘billy with different rhythms and tempos.

I’m not saying the Smee group should change…the dancers seemed perfectly happy doing WCS all night and that’s cool. What Gary and I realized is that we will always want variety in our dancing…no matter how much we love a dance we don’t want to do it all night, even if we know a million moves.

The great thing about watching specialty dancers is they know tons of moves in that dance. We picked up a few. There were some really good dancers there, albeit the styles didn't vary that much.

And that is a downside to being free birds; since our dancing doesn't conform to any set of dancing rules or style we tend to stick out. I heard one man say after we did a rumba that ballroom dancing is for old people. Which I found hilarious. Us? Ballroom dancers?

But that's OK. For us, dancing lots of different dances really is the spice that keeps us trying new things and new venues.

And I'm still giggling over the ballroom comment. Too funny.