I never did really learn how to dance when I was younger. It just always seemed like something odd to be doing. I was kind of shy about getting up in front of a bunch of people and gigging around. Besides for ever so long the girls were all taller than me, and I figured that would really cause me to stand out.

Anyway along about the mid 1980s my wife said we needed to go take dancing lessons. I went along with it, anything to make the little woman happy. She signed us up for private lessons one morning a week. So I’d get my guys lined out and going on the job, then I’d take off and meet her up off of Anderson Lane in Austin at this dance place in the middle of the morning.

What I found out later was she paid the full amount ahead of time. So there wasn’t any backing out, that is unless I wanted to see several hundred dollars just fly out the window.

I remember wanting to bale out that first day. I just had a sick feeling in my stomach. It was just nerves. But once we got inside and met our dance instructors and there were one for each of us. Mr. Garcia was hers and Miss Cupp was mine.

Miss Cupp was a pretty, slender, petite, red head (guess now would be a good time for me to dispense with the adjectives) so it soon became easier for me to get used to this dancing thing.

George Strait was the real rage of the day, so that was the music we always danced to. I guess those lessons would last for a hour, but that time always flew by. We were only a few weeks into our lessons when it became apparent that I would need surgery for a ruptured disk in my neck. No, the dancing didn’t cause it. We explained to our dance instructors that it was going to be awhile before we could resume our lessons. That was fine with them, especially since we had already paid for probably about a years worth of lessons.

It’s been 35 years since we took a break from our lessons, do you think we’ve waited to long to resume? I still have George Strait playing in my ears, but I don’t really feel the need to let that come out through my feet.