I feel like the butt of that joke :
“How do you get to Radio City Music Hall?”  And the answer is “Practice!”

Well today I did just that and it was an AWESOME PRACTICE!   I am such a “high” and want to share it with everyone!  No, I’ve not been taking drugs.  Hmmm..  Does an extra large diet coke from Jack in the Box count as “drugs”?  Well, if it does then that’s it, and that’s all I’ve had!  🙂

But I digress…  I do that don’t I?  LOL

Ok, ok, I just got home from a most AWESOME practice with my fabulous dance partner Donna.  We worked for just under an hour and a half on 40 beats of our Two-Step routine.  I don’t know how many steps that works out to because there were some syncopations involved.

All we were doing was going through every step, every move, very slowly and thoroughly and applying what we already know!  It is amazing how many things we were able to correct or fix simply by slowing down the process so we could dig through the memory banks and dredge up those things our coaches have already told us to do.  And *ahem*  [BLUSH] do what we’ve been told.  Then once we figured out what to fix, we did it over, and over and over and over and over.

I may be putting some teachers out of business here by depriving them of repeat business from inattentive students….  … but “Hey!” “Yo!”  “Fellow students  I am talkin’ to Youse!”    I may be belaboring the obvious here but if we’re paying a professional dance instructor to tell us what we’re doing wrong and how to correct it, Uhmm…. we might want to actually *do* what they tell us to do?!?  Just a thought!   Sheesh!

It really was an awesome practice, the more we worked, the more things started building on one another.  We were playing with our bodies (GETCHER MIND OUTTA THE GUTTER!) and seeing just how little or how much of a change in motion would affect different connections.

We also got to a couple of spots where the process broke down and we had to “file it away” to take back to the coach to get more detailed information.

The most amazing thing is that by doing this process, speaking for myself now, I now own it!   I had an awesome coach named David Parry who once said in response to an “Eureka moment” of mine…  “Good!  Now you own it; you’re not just leasing it.”    That really does sum it up nicely.  Sometimes, figuring it out on your own, putting pieces together by yourself makes it “stick” more than hearing it a thousand times from someone else.

Plus, I’m starting to figure out the why of how something works and how it can be transferred between dances.   Today we started on West Coast, working through some drills and techniques that Beata Howe gave us during our last lesson with her.  And in the process I discovered just how small a change in my center it took to elicit a response from my partner.  I learned that I can move my center to generate a lead and I DON’T HAVE TO TAKE A STEP TO MOVE THE CENTER!  O.M.G.!!!!   Then I took that and started applying it in Two-step!  O.M.G.!!! Again!  Wow!

Whoop!  Woooooop!  OOOooooooouuuuuugggggggHHHHHHAAAAAA!  All hands on deck!  Break through!  We’ve had a break through!  I might just turn out to be a dancer afterall!

Related Links and Articles

• I lost my job…and turned into a bear…kinda, sorta (txcowboydancer.com)
• Another New Page on my Blog: I’ve turned “Pro” (txcowboydancer.com)
• “World Championships” mean it’s time to plan for the coming Competition Year (txcowboydancer.com)
• Barbara’s Dance Studio (www.barbarasdancestudio-tx.com)
• Natalja Sawal (allballroomdance.com)