Pro dancing? Hardly!

I'd like to continue a thought from my previous blog posting.

I read some comments on that POF forum from people who scoffed at the need for a clean floor. They said "We just want to have fun. If you want to do the kind of dancing that needs a clean floor, you should go somewhere else." I see several obvious problems with this.

First is the notion that they just want to have fun. Well, so do other people who want to do dance. Who's to say that this dance should only be for the folks who don't need to move their feet and thus, don't need a clean, stickiness-free floor? That's basically reverse elitism.

Second, and this is pretty obvious, that kind of response is just rude.

This, there is this implicit notion that if you just dance to have fun, you'll be safe. Again, that's wrong. There are all sorts of moves that could be damaging to one's knees if you have a sticky floor. If you're just shuffling in place, no, but some kind of aggressive turn could be cause for hurt.

Why do I mention the knee? Because the knees can be pretty delicate. I know this from personal experience, as I'm nursing an injured knee right now. My friend Melissa, a practicing nurse, could tell you stories about people who tore their ACLs from moving in just the wrong way on the wrong kind of surface. Gotta be careful, folks.

I understand that these folks want to have fun. I just think they were being kinda childish about it, and that they were unwilling to take reasonable precautions that any dancer should know. Heck, I'm not a great dancer by any means, and yet I knew about these things long before I learned anything about how to dance!