I did something wild and crazy Friday night and went dancing. Not to a nightclub or anything like that, but to a contra dance in the church hall. This is kind of like square dancing, but in two long lines instead of squares. Think the Virginia Reel from PE class. This was, oddly, something I’d dreamed of doing for a while. A number of years ago, I read a book set in Scotland in which there was a community dance in a church hall with a local band, and they did reels and pattern dances. I thought that sounded like so much fun, but when I looked to see if there was anything like that in my area, the closest I could find was in another city in the metro area that would be about a 45-minute drive on the freeway.

I’d forgotten about that until someone in the choir announced that there would be a dance in the church hall on Friday night. A band that used to play in the area would be doing a one-night-only reunion for this. I also saw a notice in the town Facebook page, with someone trying to get together a group to go. So I said I’d go and forced myself out of the house on a Friday night. I figured at the very least I’d get to hear some good music. It was an Irish-style band, and I love Irish music. And it was in the hall of my church, which is perfect for this sort of thing (it looks kind of like the hall in a medieval castle), plus is a 5-minute drive.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. A big variety of people of all ages were there, and there were even men who came on their own. The dances are designed so that you dance with everyone along the way, but people even mixed up in choosing initial partners instead of sticking with people they came with. I’d done the English country style of dancing, like in Regency books, which is more sedate. The Appalachian style is a bit more energetic, and I realized how out of shape I was.

I do love to dance. Dancing seems to show up in a lot of my books. I took a tiny tots dance class as a very small child and did dance routines to my records in my room. I tried taking a real ballet class in elementary school but found it boring since it was just exercises, no dancing (my adult ballet teacher said that was a bad class because although the exercise part of it is important, each class should include some center work with choreography). I was in the ballroom dancing club in college and loved that but wasn’t able to find a good place to dance as an adult. The one time I had a date to go dancing, I found that everyone only danced with the person they came with, which meant there was no point in going to public dances without a partner. Some of the big science fiction conventions, especially those near the West Coast, have ballroom or contra dancing as part of them, and I’ve taken advantage of that.

I took adult ballet for about 10 years, until I had a knee issue and had to drop out and do physical therapy, and then the pandemic hit, and then they fired the teacher who taught the adult classes. They have a ballet studio that offers adult classes here, but I don’t know if I want to get back into that.

Now I know that some people in choir are part of the local social dance scene, so I can get clued in to the other events they do, and I may get to do it more often. It’s great exercise, plus a way to meet people and be part of a community.

So you can probably look forward to more dance scenes in my books.