I've never really been much of a dancer. When I was growing up, ballet was an upper-middle-class rite of passage for little girls (and mothers who knew they MUST get the right dance school or Catriona/Lily/Olivia wouldn't be asked to the right parties where at least two little angels would show up in the same Laura Ashley taffeta party frock), and as most rites of passage are, it was utterly hellish. At 5, my teacher was telling me to "hold in my stomach", which meant I didn't breathe for one entire class and went a really nasty shade of blue. And people wonder from whence my neuroses spring. At six, when all the other little girls were pretending to be swans or bunnies or butterflies for a "dance like an animal" task, I chose to be a donkey, complete with galloping, hair-tossing and some braying (accidental). At seven, I got the lowest mark in the class for my ballet exam. At eight, I quit.
In many ways, Scottish Country Dancing is much more me; I've been doing it since I was two on family holidays to Crieff Hydro (again, in Laura Ashley taffeta), and at least at ceilidhs, it is less about grace and perfection and more about having a galumphing good time. However, "social dancing" at school somehow managed to scupper this also; not only was it not cool to try but unless you were very popular or had a lot of friends of the opposite sex, it basically turned into two periods of humiliating rejection as your friends were asked to dance and even the one nerd you had managed to blackmail into asking you at lunch the previous day tried desperately to avoid your line of sight until you were the only two left and the gym mistress forced you together on pain of laps and press-ups.
It was, therefore, with some trepidation that I signed up to a course of burlesque classes last month (with a tiny bit of encouragement from ACS!).
The only guidance I was given by the dance school was "arrive early in loose clothing and with small heels"; to that list I added "have a glass of wine because the thought of both dancing and acting sexily in front of a mirror scares me cackless". However, the first thing I noticed was that there were people of all ages and sizes there, and many were in full makeup and cute outfits, rather showing me up in my uncharacteristic tinted moisturiser and joggers. The first week, we were emphatically told by our teacher, Gypsy Charms (who I later found out has a PhD in burlesque and stripping; you couldn't make my life up) that burlesque is NOT a dance form, it is a PERFORMANCE ART.... and then we proceeded to dance for an hour. We learned a traditional basic and then a modern, slightly Pussycat Dolls routine, complete with bottom-thrusting and hip wiggling and bump 'n' grind (which is basically a series of swivels and hooha thrusts), all while making the sort of facial expressions usually seen in a Carry On film circa 1972. I looked utterly ridonkulous, I missed some of the moves..... and I left feeling like the sexiest thing on earth. Christina Hendricks ain't got nothing on me.
This week we learned how to sexily remove a glove while shimmying our thang (or however many thangs we may have). The shimmying terrified me; while I have a natural sense of rhythm, nothing ever exactly moves when I want it to. My chest is usually at least half a bar behind - I move left, it goes right, I move right, it remains left, we stop to pose and I am still jiggling like a blancmange in shock. However again, no matter how stupid I looked in the mirror, I felt great. Some of the poses made me look like a geriatric with a bladder problem, others like my behind look the size of Arthur's Seat, and my face is still half blow-up doll, half terrified rabbit, but I'm improving. I'm walking differently, flirting more, and next time it is cold, watch out for my attempt to take off my cashmere gloves with my teeth before I run them all over my body.......
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