Blog 5

 When people look at me they don't think “Oh look at that guy, I bet he is a really good dancer” because I'm not. I'm actually pretty bad in my opinion. But I did learn how to dance a couple months ago for my cousin's quinceañera (a sweet fifteen in English). And so began my story of how I learned to dance.

A quinceañera is a big party for a fifteen year old girl where she makes the transition from a girl to a woman. It is the biggest dream, besides their wedding, of a Hispanic girl to have a gigantic and amazing party. The tradition is that the girl and the her chambelanes perform multiple dances. That is where I come in. I was chosen by my cousin to one of her chambelanes, I knew what that entailed and I wanted to decline really badly, but it is frowned upon to decline such a request. Therefore I became a chambelan, but unfortunately for my cousin I am literally her only male relative that is young/ old enough to be eligible for this position. The typical quinceañera has like six to eight chambelanes, we had to ask multiple family friends because the next male in my family turns out to be my brother who was ten years old at the time (which is too young), and adults are not eligible to be chambelanes. Eventually we found four people willing to do it. We started taking dance lessons in September and had two months to learn six dances, not too hard right?

Well it turned out that all of us were pretty quick learners. We learned the dances in time and we weren't half bad. But along the way we learned to laugh at ourselves and to not be so self conscience. Most of the time I would be laughing at one of the other chambelanes until I realized that I looked just as ridiculous. If the creators of the dances had seen us they would have probably cried, and it didn't help that our parents would take pictures and videos of us and then show us later just to get a good laugh. I didn't really like dancing and I still don't but I did learn how to dance bachata, merengue and some traditional Mexican dances.

When the day of the party arrived our dance teacher we got to wear tuxedos with pink bow ties all day taking pictures and riding a limo, blasting music around the lovely streets of Poughkeepsie. I think that was my favorite part or maybe it was the food, anyways on that day our dance teacher was freaking out but she was trying to hide it by telling us that we were going to do great. She would not stop fidgeting and she was exuding anxiety, so we tried avoiding her. When the big moment arrived we did fine (that is what we were told), I messed up a few times but they were not conspicuous errors, and we survived. After our final dance I realized that moving around like a fool in front of people was not that bad and I think I stopped caring about whether I was good or not st dancing as long as I was having fun.