Friday, December 04, 2009

Now that was a terrible sight

Every now and then, you get some annoying people at the local swing dance events. There was one such guy recently.

First, a word of explanation. It takes a while for newbies to learn how to dance swing, so you've got to expect that some folks won't know the moves very well. Nevertheless, it's expected that even newbies will at least try to dance in a swing style.

At one of the recent swing dances, there was this fella who wasn't doing swing at all. Instead, he was just messing around, swing his arms around with his partner and just making stuff up on the spot -- badly. You know, just swaying around and moving his arms about, as well as those of his partner. That was distracting enough, but this fella chose to do so RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the dance floor. You'd think that if he didn't know the moves, he'd stick to the perimeter of the floor instead of staking out a spot right where everybody could see it.

Now, it would be one thing if he was at least doing some other style -- foxtrot or salsa, for example. People would just figure that he was trying something different. When you're just messing about though, that shows that you're not really trying very hard.

To make matters worse -- and I don't mean to be unkind -- he was badly overweight. I mean SEVERELY overweight. There's no moral or social culpability in that; however, he was wearing an ill-fitting shirt, and so as he swayed back and forth, he had huge layers of flab flopping out of his shirt and bouncing around. It was a painful and disturbing sight to behold.

I don't want to disparage the guy for being fat. I do wonder if he knew how unslightly and disturbing it was to see these huge flaps of flab peeking out from his shirt and flying about. Yeow.