don't look down

so said Igor, who pulled me from off the sidelines watching the ballroom dancers, to do a rhumba.

but first, let me say, ballroom dancing is an unfortunate thing.
really I just want to dance.
more urgently though, I don't want to admit I'm middle aged, scooting my expanding caboose around what used to be a sport-boating showroom in the dull corridor to the suburbs of the town I grew up in. How did my life happen this way?

not an attractive person in the bunch. nowhere. As bad as Virginia.
but many, many people there: the stiff Ukranian teenager dancing with the guy with the comb-over, the very wrinkled, very done up, sixty year old blonde with the knockout legs dancing with who? just another puffy guy from North Highlands, etc.

there was though one short moment, as I was watching, uncommitted from the sidelines and getting ever closer to the door, in which all these aged, transplanted and average became momentarily somehow beautiful. a waltz, I guess. the room lifted and became light. the fact that they were all so kind-of lost looking and non-telegenic made it all the more sweet. the poorly draped white christmas lights took on all the cheap splendor of, say, the Tavern on the Green. And these little humans were doing everything just right. Trying. And succeeding. A little breath of romance seemed to turn them.

Then Igor found me, for the next dance, a Lithuanian with a firm grip on my hand and the small of my back. "Shortshortshortlong," he said at a polite distance into my ear.

huh? short short long short? which foot?
now?

anyway.
You're at the back of the room now.
Just count. Shortshortshortlong.
Don't look at yourself in the mirror.

Don't look down.