Zumba!

Should really be referred to as "My hips don't do that."

At the prompting of my charmingly deceitful younger sister, Miss Lee, under the guise of "It'll be FUN! and it's only five dollars!", we went to a zumba class last night. If you don't know what zumba is, go to the internet and look up Shakira. See that hip shaking madness going on? Those impossibly sexy looking maneuvers that she's doing with a smile on her face? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what it's supposed to look like. When I'm doing it? Not so much.

So, thankfully, the two of us made up half the class. You know, less people to see the awkwardness that is me trying to dance. There's a reason I don't dance. I have the grace and agility of a newborn calf. My legs don't go where they're supposed to and there's a lot of wobbling going on. And that's just the warm up.

Now luckily for us, our leader Daphne let us know ahead of time that she would "slow things down" for us. Because we're new and all. Thank goodness for that as I cannot even imagine if things were up to speed. She showed us a few of the basic moves prior to starting and several times throughout. It certainly seemed doable.

And so we began. And the difference between watching her walk through the steps and making a stab at doing them up to dance speed was incredibly large. I stumbled along slightly behind, desperately watching Daphne's feet for some inkling of what direction I should be headed next. I was mostly moving in the same general direction as the rest of the class, just a whole lot less gracefully. But it gets better. Because now that the feet are moving, we need to add arm movement. Lord help me, I cannot do two things at once and it has to be painfully obvious to those around me.

So there I am, tripping over my feet and flailing my arms wildly about when Daphne adds clapping and intermittent jumping to the mix. Seriously? Clapping? And jumping? Because I'm not amusing enough to watch as it is? Oh wait, is she swiveling her hips while turning in a circle? And now she's facing me because I cannot seem to swivel and turn fast enough to be pointing in the right direction. At that point, since I couldn't see what the hell she was even doing, I just start making it up as I go. Hey, look at me go! I can (sort of) gyrate and swing my hips about! Woo hoo! Okay, hang on, I think I'm the only one still facing this direction. Whoops! And now Miss Lee is bearing down on me because we're supposed to be grape-vine-ing to the right.

Approximately fifty five minutes later we got to the cool down song. I had stumbled, lagged, dragged, gyrated, flailed and tripped my way through most of the class, clapping off beat and jumping up when others were squatting. But I made it. I had sat out one song when it occurred to me that I was seeing stars and had a very real possibility of passing out because I am so woefully out of shape. I was out of breath, sweating like a pig and my legs were shaking. Driving a stick shift home made me glad it was mostly highway since I didn't really have to push the clutch very often.

This morning, my thighs and butt hurt like hell. That is not a feeling I cherish. But there's another class on Wednesday and I'll be in it.