I wish... I could street dance (part 2)

Doing something for the first time is less scary than thinking about doing it.

Last Thursday I attended my first street dance lesson. I stood at the back of the room behind rows of other dancers and faced mirrors that entirely covered the opposite wall. The instructor pressed play on his MP3 player and stood at the front. He counted us in: "One two three four-"

...

Six days earlier, the morning after I announced my new wish, I caught sight of my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My hair had receded another inch overnight, I was sure of it. 

I can't learn to street dance, I thought. I'm too old! 

My friends were kind. Online, a few of them said they liked my wish and that I was very brave. To my face, they said nothing. 

Then the videos came... One friend sent me a video called Rock Stars Dancing Like Your Dad, which should have been called A Dad Dancing Like Rock Stars In His Back Yard In Fast Forward. Another forwarded me Burning Star Sampoornesh Babu Love Scene, in which a tubby mustachioed singer heel-kicks a meteorite and twerks at the camera.

Oh no, I thought, that's going to be me. An embarrassment. Ridiculous. A bad dancer.

I was undecided about whether to go to the street dance lesson until I received an email from Annalies at Marina Studios on Monday, asking me to confirm which class I wanted to attend. Adult street dance on Thursday at 9pm, I emailed back. There. Done. No going back. You will do this Richard.

Thursday evening came quickly. I psyched myself up. I stuck a Street Dance CD in the ghetto blaster (old skool!) and jumped around my room. Come on then, let's do this!

What am I going to wear? Crap. Should have thought about this earlier. I revisited the website. It recommended loose clothing like leggings or shorts. Hmm. My shorts are all Bermuda-style or khaki. No good. I remembered I had some black tracksuit bottoms with my cycling gear. They were a bit buffed and shiny in the crotch, but they would do.

Next? A T-shirt. Easy. I've got a Quiksilver T-shirt with polaroid-style pictures of a skateboarder on it. Doing jumps. On a street. It's so street that it's got an actual street on it. 

I put it on. It looked... wrong. And the off-white colour looked bland over my tracksuit bottoms. What about a black T-shirt? No, stupid. Black over black? I'd look like a ninja. Eventually I chose a bright orange T-shirt with a garish pattern and oversized brand name. Perfect.

Finally, trainers. Got. One pair of white Nike runners. Sorted.

All that remained was to make my head look acceptable. I put contact lenses in, poked at my hair with wax, and plucked unwanted hairs out of other places. Especially grey ones. It was a futile attempt to pass myself off as twentysomething, but by God I would give it my best shot.

I was running late, but at last I was ready. I took a photo to record the moment. If I hadn't felt so nervous, I would have smiled.

I drove to Brighton in a hurry. It was dark and rainy outside but inside I was singing and dancing to my Street Dance CD. It would be OK. It would be OK.

To my dismay, the entrance to Marina Studios was glowing with unflattering fluorescent light. Through the floor to ceiling windows I could see small groups of young women standing about or reclining on sofas. I walked straight past them to the reception and tried not to imagine them pointing and laughing at my emerging bald spot.

Fifteen minutes later I was standing in a dance studio. I had been ignored by two women sitting nearest to me in the waiting area but I had summoned up enough courage to introduce myself to another man. His name was Richard as well, which helped break the ice. 

I also got talking to a woman in the queue called Piya (I am guessing at the spelling), another mature first-timer. Although the average age in the class was between 20 and 30, there were at least two women in their forties or fifties. Piya and I had been worried about being the oldest. Now we were there, we didn't feel old at all.

It helped that the dance instructor, JP, was no teenybopper either. But he could move fast and loose and he pushed us very hard to do the same. In a fun way though, with lots of jokes. I laughed a lot. At him, but also at myself. In my very first street dance lesson JP got me boyband sliding, hip rotating, spin jumping and bum wiggling. I have no idea what it looked like but it was a lot of fun to do.

At the end of the lesson JP split the class into two groups. Why? To perform to each other! I felt incredibly self-conscious, but I focussed on remembering the sequence of moves we had learned to the song Get On Up by James Brown. I wasn't a complete disaster - I hope - but my solid start gradually unravelled until I was flailing about one beat behind the regular dancers. I finished with a flourish though, leaping and then sliding to a stop.

I was drenched in sweat. We all were. One hour of intense dance will do that to you. We gave ourselves a round of applause, fetched our bags and said our goodbyes. Piya asked me if I would be back next week. Definitely, I said.

The next lesson is tomorrow.

What is your wish of the month? What could you do for the first time instead of just thinking about it?