Zumba is for shakers

Being as I am a person of sound mind and less-than-sound body, it would seem that a logical answer to a rebelling body is to feed it strength and starve it of crap.  So, on Thursday when I got a text from Courtney at 5:45 saying that we should check out Zumba for the free week of Fun Fit Forever at 6:00, I said sure.  I had a vague idea of what Zumba was.  It had been presented to me in the following terms:

--A blast!
--So good for you!
--So fun it's not even like real exercise!

Those are things I like in my exercise, if I ever like exercise.  We walked in, and I was amazed by how many people there were.  At least 50, I'd say.  Believe me when I tell you that out of those 50 people, I was the saddest mover out there.

It started out fair enough.  They played Aqua's Barbie Girl, and, perhaps because I know the lyrics, the dance moves we did to them were easy enough to remember and repeat.  Next was Do You Love Me.  That was similarly awesome.  I can do this.

Then every song was incredibly fast-paced Latin music in Spanish.  That's fine.  But I couldn't understand the lyrics at that pace and thus had no idea when they were repeating, so I had even less of a chance of hooking the lyrics up to some smooth movies.  Unfortunately, as I'm a Spanish minor, this was depressing in more ways than one.

I swear, everybody else in that room was straight from the set of Step Up.  Or Step Up 2.  Or Magic Mike.  Some Channing Tatum dancing movie, anyway.  They were shaking bits of themselves that I don't even know how to shake.  My body doesn't do seduction.  I get by in romance on sheer enthusiasm, I think.   I don't even shake those parts in the privacy of my own home with my husband.  And all these people, all in unison, shaking what I previously thought was unshakeable, moving the unmoveable, thrusting the unthrustable, stroking the unstrokeable.   Well, let me amend.  I totally can shake my chest, but I try not to, both because it HURTS when you have more than a B cup (or a C or D cup in my case) and because I'd rather not put someone's eye out.

Of course, it didn't help that, anticipating my poor dance skills, I situated myself at the back of the room.  Unfortunately, I was only even passable at the first two dances.  It turns out that after each dance the people in back move forward.  I was getting progressively bad and progressively visible.  Not awesome.
My mantra, not so much "I can do this!" as "What the HELL!" was on repeat in my brain.  And for some songs I just stood there like an idiot in a sea of enthusiastic ants on crack (or unbelievably good dancers) and shrugged.

My one comfort is that if someone else was feeling a little self-conscious about their moves (not likely!), they could at least point to me and go, "Well... at least I'm not as bad as THAT girl."   And then I have the luxury of responding to them in my head with, "Yeah, well, I'm disabled, jackass."


I'm definitely going again next week.