Dancin'!

This has been a pretty weird weekend because I've been out dancing two nights in a row. I would say I don't know when the last time I did that was, only I don't think I've ever done that. I like to go dancing but it's not an opportunity that seems to present itself in my life very often. Probably something to do with having kids when I was young and supposed to be doing stuff like going out and dancing.

Anyway -- Friday there was this jewelry party at my gym, and then some of us went out and had dinner, and then a few of us in that group ended up going over to a bar where they had a deejay. Okay, so it was five of us women over 35, in a big, not very full bar, and we were the only ones dancing, so for a while the deejay tried to keep us happy with lots of eighties and early nineties music. Then two college-age girls joined us, and he obviously started to feel like he needed to cater to the crowd in the bar, and this is a college town, so... Anyway, for a while it was like we were battling the college girls for control of the deejay -- he'd play an eighties song, and some of them would drift away, and then he'd pump up some rap and we'd go sit down. A couple times he managed to play something no one had any interest in, and then the floor would be empty for a few minutes. I didn't envy the deejay -- he was trying to keep everyone happy, and obviously there were wildly divergent tastes to deal with. But in the end, the battle was lost, as we figured it would be -- we were severely outnumbered, and around midnight it had been more than 20 minutes since we'd heard anything we wanted to dance to, so we took off. It was fun while it lasted though.

Last night, Reasonable Man and I went to this Christmas party for one of his clients that we've gone to for the last several years. In the past it's always been held somewhere where you can walk around socializing and having drinks for a while, and then you sit down at one of the tables and have dinner and then they have a big presentation where they have a raffle where all the employees win things like restaurant gift certificates and that sort of thing. It's not the most exciting thing in the world, especially since I don't know many of the people there, but it's kinda fun and I don't mind going. This year I was actually excited about it, because it was being held on a boat on the Sacramento River, and I love going on boats.

Well, as it turned out, the whole thing mostly blew. First, we all stood around freezing on the dock for twenty minutes while all the different parties boarded before ours did. Then, as soon as we got on, we all had to choose a seat and stay there for pretty much the whole evening. We ended up at a table with some cool people, so that was nice, but what exactly is the point of having a party with around 50 people in that kind of setting? You don't get to circulate at all, and I didn't really know anyone so I didn't care all that much, but if it had been my company, I don't think I would have been very happy about it. Also, it was cold -- I spent most of the evening bundled up in my jacket and my scarf. Also, we were on the bottom deck, and everyone from the top deck got to get food before we did. Actually, the people I felt sorriest for were the other party downstairs with us, because they were right next to the food, and they got to go and load up their plates dead last. Pretty bogus deal there!

The whole thing was kind of shabby -- we drank wine out of plastic cups and the guy next to me had a knife that was greasy and had some dried food on it when we first sat down. The food wasn't bad, but the way we all were herded around to get it seemed kind of silly. And the whole effect of being on a boat was kind of lost due to the fact that the windows got fogged up and you couldn't really see anything outside of them anyway, since it was dark. Overall -- not too impressive.

But -- after dinner, they had a deejay by the tiny dance floor upstairs, and Reasonable Man and I headed up there to boogie down, and that was fun. I couldn't help noticing the contrast between my two dance experiences -- Friday night, we were a tiny group on a huge empty dance floor, and Saturday, a ridiculous number of people were crammed onto this tiny one. But people were having fun, and since it was a crowd made up of people closer to our age than the night before, the music was pretty decent. No eighties new wave -- this wasn't really that crowd either -- but it was mostly older stuff that we knew, so we enjoyed it. Even when they played "You Shook Me All Night Long," which is probably Ryan's least favorite song of all time since he hates the AC/DC singer's voice, we had fun with it.

Anyway, who knows? We're going over to some friends' house for dinner tonight -- can I make it three nights in a row dancing? That would be fun, but I kind of worry that this old body can't take it that much excitement in one weekend :-)