Gwenda has a highly accurate account of dance lessons, complete with clumsy bald guys, sad middle aged couples and tittering dwarfs. I want to assure everyone that ballroom dance lessons are really like this, particularly the ones that involve neophytes getting to a dance hall two hours before everyone else to pick up a few moves from an instructor barking over an inaudible PA system (or, even worse, with one of those damn headsets).
[8/11/05 UPDATE: Nearly eighteen months after I made a New Year's resolution to thoroughly learn ballroom dancing, I have failed to follow up. At least from a long-term perspective. Much of this has to do with a promise I made to a now ex-girlfriend that I would take ballroom dance lessons with her. Sadly, the relationship ended before such a plan could come to fruition. Instead, what generally happens these days is that I attend some random lesson in a genteel club out of the blue (often with whomever I am dating), attempt to learn the intricate moves (taught as if one is supposed to learn these things by osmosis rather than cogent instructions), and stumble accordingly as partners are exchanged. But I'm great on a dance floor with idiotic Caucasians! Perhaps because I am more ambitious. I'm probably thinking of dancing right now because I have a date tonight and I'm thinking of intimacy, because it's been a while (not too long but I'm impatient) since I went dancing and smelled a woman's nice perfume and held her in my arms, and because I figure nobody will possibly sift through the archives to read these personal ramblings. That's the great irony ab0ut categorizing everything. You think it's for your users, but really you become personally connected to it and you start writing these longass afterwords as if you're compiling some book -- when, in fact, very few people care about these obscure peregrinations.]
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (