Projects have been undertaken. They were interesting. The quest continues.
I don’t know if it’s on the “about me” section or not, and I’m too lazy to check. But my main hobby is ballroom dancing, which I discovered in my mid-thirties and have come to wish that I had discovered it much, much earlier. If you’ve never done it, I would encourage you to try it out sometime. It bas a lot of potential benefits, but for me the biggest one was that it proved to be the key to getting control of my mental health (virtually everyone who pursues this seriously is a drama queen and/or a major head case, trust me.). And that has led to a complete reshuffling of my life and priorities. Maybe appearance a little bit, also, although some might argue that had more to do with the aftermath of the Ballerina Snobberina relationship.
It didn’t happen overnight. It took about 4 years, 2 teachers, and 2 real jobs’ worth of frustrations and drama. But without the studio, I don’t know if it ever would have happened. I hit a point that I had been to a couple of times before. Basically I did it because of my relationship with my teacher, who also kind of made it okay for me to take that step. No, we never dated. No, she is not the Ballerina Snobberina. We’ve come close a couple times, maybe. Who knows? I wouldn’t hold my breath but I wouldn’t rule it out either. It isn’t that kind of a relationship, but it runs very very, very deep (this is not unusual). There are definitely some differences, but in a lot of ways she’s kind of like a female version of me. Yes, the Ballerina Snobberina was a teacher. No, I never took lessons from her, and we’re way off topic.
At any rate. I have been at this for a number of years, started doing it competitively, have flirted with the idea of going pro. The idea here being to turn something that costs me money into something that makes me money, and to take a step in the direction of declaring independence from the corporate machine. Being as old as I am does not help. Being able to do it and being a lead helps a great deal (there is a massive gender imbalance in this field). (Ironically if you are a lead your students are mostly going to be follows, and vice versa, which means that you will spend most of your time teaching the opposite of the part you are actually going to dance. Yes this does get confusing from time to time. Yes you do get used to it after a while.) Why not audition?
So I auditioned. (Yes, I told my teacher what I was doing beforehand.) Here comes the interesting bit. This particular opportunity came from one of the larger franchises. I was the only one who showed up with a pair of actual dancing shoes. I was the only one who actually knew anything about how to dance, if I say so myself I was at roughly the level of the actual instructors who were there. I was somewhat successful at bringing some of the other applicants up & along. And I didn’t make the shortlist.
It wasn’t about dancing ability at all. They actually don’t care about that – they figure if you don’t know it they can teach you, so that is not a big deal. It was about salesmanship. That and perhaps a few other qualities we won’t get into here and now, but that was clearly what they were looking for. Extraverts who love to throw parties and are capable of selling. That is not my nature, exactly, although I have done a tiny bit of salesmanship here & there & wasn’t terrible at it. I need to sharpen that up, of course, but I can stretch myself and doing exactly that was basically the big idea. I figured working on those skills for a while there would set me up for success in other endeavors later. That is probably still true, but I will need to devise a different way of doing that.
So that was a very unexpected result. At least I got farther than the last time I tried this when the ol’ resume got circularly filed. If I ever try to go this route again, I have a much better idea how to approach it. If not, well, I got to look at things from a different angle than usual and it was interesting.
Since I’m going back to the drawing board maybe I can get back to posting a little more regularly. Maybe I’ll add another Bruce chapter. Regardless. More to come. Maybe I can figure out how to monetize the blog.
Leave a Reply