tango terror

On Thursday my friend Lili convinced me to go out to La Viruta for some tango dancing. Everyone here is obsessed with Tango! At La Viruta, for $8 pesos, they have group lessons for all levels from beginner to expert, and then after the lessons, an open milonga for everyone to dance. I don't dance very much, like back in New York I would usually wait until it's late at night and everyone is really drunk and nobody's watching, before I head onto the dance floor. The thing is that everyone loves dancing, and people always want you to dance and have fun, and everyone loves dance parties, and people feel sad if you don't join in and have fun dancing with them, and sometimes I do have lots of fun dancing if I can get over myself. I always thought about maybe taking dance lessons someday, like if I took some beginner lessons of some kind, it would help me feel less shy. So I said yes, I will go to La Viruta with Lili and take a tango lesson! But I was feeling super terrified for the entire week beforehand, and I was feeling even more terrified when I got there and joined the flock of beginner students. They taught us a few basic steps (in Spanish so I'm not exactly sure what they were saying), and then had us practice with different partners. I danced with four or five different men, and I stepped on all of their toes, and we crashed into other couples many times, and I spent the whole lesson struggling against strong urges to run and hide in the bathroom with a stiff capirinha. But I actually had fun for a few minutes, and I felt very proud of myself for doing something very scary to me. It made me think about how many things used to be really scary to me (like olives, amusement parks, riding in boats, talking to strangers, driving a car, asking someone out on a date, speaking a foreign language, etc), and most of them turned out to be really fun and awesome and made my life so much richer. This just makes me look forward to when I am an old lady and I will have tried everything under the sun and I will no longer be afraid of ANYTHING AT ALL!