Hello, and welcome to our page. We are Marion and Frank, we are sixty-two and sixty-three, and in February of 1997, for reasons we'll get to, we walked into a dance studio for the first time in our lives. We have gone back nearly every week since. This page is for anybody who has ever watched a couple glide across a floor and thought "we could never do that." You could. We couldn't either.

How it started (Marion writing): our daughter got married in the fall of 1996. At the reception there was a band, and the band played a waltz, and Frank and I stood up and did what we had always done at weddings, which was to shuffle in a small circle and hold on. And then our new son-in-law's parents got up, and they danced. A real waltz, turning, all the way around the floor, and people stopped to watch. I looked at Frank and Frank looked at me and Frank said, "Well, that's embarrassing." A month later I found the studio in the phone book, and for Frank's sixtieth birthday I gave him a card that said "Six lessons. No arguments." He argued. He went.

Frank here. I want it on the record that I went under protest and that I was terrible for approximately four months. I also want it on the record that I now own dance shoes and I know what a "heel lead" is and I am not ashamed.

The waltz is in three-quarter time: ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, with the weight on the first beat. The basic figure is the box step, six steps over two measures, and the feet trace a box on the floor. This is the first thing anyone learns and, our teacher says, the last thing anyone perfects.

Stand facing your partner. The leader's right hand is on the follower's left shoulder blade, the follower's left hand rests on the leader's right upper arm, and the other two hands are joined out to the side at about the follower's eye level. Stand up straight, elbows up, and look over each other's right shoulder, not at your feet. (Everyone looks at their feet. Everyone is told not to. Everyone keeps doing it for a year.)

Forward, side, together; back, side, together. Say it out loud. We did, for weeks, in the kitchen. Once you can do it standing still, you learn to turn the box a quarter turn to the left on each half, so that in four boxes you've gone all the way around, and that's the waltz that goes around the room.

Rise and fall is what makes it look like a waltz instead of a march. On count one you step with a slightly bent knee, low, and on two and three you rise up onto the balls of your feet, and at the end of three you lower again for the next one. Down-up-up, down-up-up. It's the rising that makes the dress swirl. It's the lowering that Frank forgot for the first year.

What goes wrong: the leader takes too big a step on one and the follower can't keep up; the follower anticipates and leads herself; both of you look down; both of you count out loud in public. All of these are normal. All of them go away, except the counting out loud, which Frank still does under his breath and thinks I can't hear.

The foxtrot is in four-four time, and it's the dance for nearly all the big band music you already love; if the band is playing Sinatra, it's a foxtrot. The rhythm of the basic step is slow, slow, quick, quick: a "slow" takes two beats and a "quick" takes one, so the whole figure is six beats, a measure and a half. That's the part that confuses people; it doesn't line up with the music the way the waltz does, and you just have to trust it.

The foxtrot travels: the slows walk you down the floor and the quicks move you sideways, and you go around the room counterclockwise with everybody else (see etiquette). Unlike the waltz there's no rise and fall to speak of; it's smooth and low, gliding, "like you're walking with a book on your head," which is what our teacher says, and once Frank actually did it with a book on his head to prove a point and it worked.

The foxtrot is Frank's favorite because you're basically walking, and Frank can walk. It is my favorite because of the music. When the studio puts on "The Way You Look Tonight" on a Saturday, the whole floor sighs.

We go to the Meadowbrook Dance Studio, which is upstairs from a furniture store on the main street of town: a big wooden floor, mirrors on one wall, a stereo, a rack of dance shoes for sale, and a coffee pot. It is run by a woman named Gloria who has been teaching for thirty years and who can make a sixty-three-year-old man with two left feet believe he has one and a half. Everything here is what we pay there; other studios will differ.

• Group classes: $8 per person per class, an hour, six to twelve couples, one dance per month (September is waltz, October is foxtrot, and so on around the year). You rotate partners in the group class, which horrified Frank at first and is the best way to learn, since a good follower can tell you exactly what your lead is doing wrong and a good leader can tell me the same. We take one group class a week. That's $16 a week, $64 a month for the two of us.
• Private lessons: $45 for a half hour, $80 for an hour, with Gloria or one of her two instructors. We took one a week for the first four months, then every other week, and now one a month, mostly before a test or when one of us has "developed a habit." A private lesson fixes in thirty minutes what a group class circles for six weeks. If you can only afford one thing, take a group class; if you can afford two, add a private lesson every few weeks.
• Saturday night social: $7 per person, or $5 if you took a class that week, and that includes a half-hour beginner lesson before the dancing starts.
• Shoes: see below. About $60 to $90 a pair. You will need one pair. You will end up with three.
• The medal test: $35 each, once a year if you want to take it. See below.

Add it up and we spend about a hundred and twenty dollars a month, most months, on dancing. Frank, who kept the books at a lumber yard for thirty-one years, has calculated that this is less than we used to spend on a Saturday night at a restaurant where we would sit across from each other and talk about the children, and it comes with exercise and a reason to buy a new dress. I have not argued with the calculation.

The Saturday social at Meadowbrook runs from eight to eleven. Seven-thirty is the beginner lesson, which we still go to sometimes because it's a good warm-up and because we remember what it was like to stand in that circle not knowing where the feet went. Then Gloria puts on the music, a foxtrot first, always, and forty or fifty people, from a pair of teenagers to a gentleman named Walter who is eighty-four and dances every dance, are on the floor.

The music runs in a rotation: foxtrot, waltz, rumba, swing, cha-cha, tango, then around again, with a Viennese waltz about once an hour to clear the floor of everybody but the show-offs, a line dance for the folks who came without partners, and a mixer or two where you change partners every sixteen bars and end up dancing with the mailman. There's punch and cookies in the corner. Nobody drinks. Nobody needs to.

What we love about it, and we've tried to figure this out: it's the only place we go where we hold each other for three hours. Thirty-eight years married and we'd gotten out of the habit. Also: you cannot worry about anything while you're counting. Try it. Frank's blood pressure has gone down. His doctor asked what he was doing differently and he said "the foxtrot" and she wrote it down.

1. Line of dance. The traveling dances (foxtrot, waltz, tango, Viennese) go counterclockwise around the room, everybody in the same direction, like a track. Faster couples on the outside, slower and beginners toward the middle, and the very center is for the spot dances (rumba, swing, cha-cha) that don't travel. Never go against the flow. Never stop in the outside lane to talk.
2. Asking. Anyone may ask anyone. "Would you like to dance?" is the whole script. If asked, say yes if you possibly can; if you can't (your feet, your knee, you promised this one), say "not this one, but please ask me again," and mean it.
3. One dance, then thank you. If you asked someone other than your partner, dance the one dance, walk them back to where they were, and say thank you. Don't keep them.
4. No teaching on the social floor. The floor is for dancing, not lessons. If your partner does something wrong, follow anyway and say nothing. If it's your own spouse, say nothing especially. (Frank and I have a rule: whatever happens on the floor Saturday can be discussed on Sunday, after church, over coffee, once.)
5. Dance to your partner's level. A good leader makes a beginner look good. A leader who shows off at the beginner's expense is the one person everybody at the studio can name.
6. Bumps happen. Both couples say "sorry," both couples keep going, nobody looks back. The leader is responsible for steering; the follower is responsible for a warning squeeze on the shoulder if something's coming from behind.
7. Freshen up. A breath mint, a handkerchief, a second shirt for the men in July. You are going to be eight inches from a stranger's face. Be kind.
8. The last dance is with the one you came with.

We danced our first six lessons in street shoes and I want to save you that. Street shoes have rubber soles that grip the floor, which is exactly what you don't want when you're trying to turn. Real ballroom shoes have suede soles that slide just enough, and they change everything. Ours came from the rack at the studio; a dance supply catalog will also have them.

• For her: a closed-toe or strappy pump with a heel about an inch and a half to two inches high, a strap across the instep so it stays on when you rise, and suede soles. I was warned off the three-inch heels the young women wear and I was warned right. My first pair was a plain tan pump; my second pair was black satin for the medal test; my third pair I do not need and bought anyway.
• For him: a plain black lace-up oxford with a low heel and a suede sole. It looks like a dress shoe and dances like a slipper. Frank has one pair. He says one pair is all a man needs and I say that's why men have one pair.
• Never wear them outside. Not to the car, not across the parking lot. The suede picks up grit and the soles are ruined. Carry them in a bag and change at the studio, like everyone does.
• Brush the soles now and then with a wire shoe brush (the studio has one) to bring the nap back up.
• Break them in at home for a week before you dance in them. Blisters are the number one reason beginners quit after lesson three. Number two is pride.

Ballroom studios teach from a syllabus, a list of figures for each dance in order from bronze (beginner) through silver and gold, and once a year Gloria brings in an examiner from outside the studio to test whoever wants to be tested. You dance each figure on the list, with your partner, in front of the examiner, and you get a mark and a certificate and, if you pass, a little medal. It's not a competition; nobody wins. It's just proof that you did the work. We wanted proof.

We took the bronze test in waltz and foxtrot on Saturday afternoon, June 12, after four months of private lessons that were mostly Gloria saying "again" and "heel, Frank, heel." The examiner was a very kind woman in a blue suit who wrote a great deal on a clipboard. We danced the waltz box, the left turn, the right turn, the change steps and the hesitation; and the foxtrot basic, the promenade, the left turn and the right turn. It took eleven minutes. It felt like an hour. I forgot to breathe during the waltz and Frank forgot to rise, but we did not forget to smile, because Gloria had told us that whatever else we did we must not stop smiling, and I think that's what saved us.

We passed. "Commended," which is the middle mark, above "pass" and below "highly commended," and which the examiner wrote was "a very musical waltz; watch the frame on the foxtrot." The frame on the foxtrot is Frank's elbows. Frank's elbows are our project for silver.

The medals are on the mantel next to the wedding picture, which I think is where they belong.

Frank and I have talked about this a good deal, usually in the car on the way home on Saturday night, and this is where we've landed.

We should have started at thirty because at thirty our knees were better and our memories were better and we'd have had thirty years of Saturday nights instead of two and a half. We should have started at thirty because when the children were small and we were tired and cross with each other, three hours a week of holding on and counting would have done us more good than most of what we tried. We should have started at thirty because every wedding for thirty years we sat down for the waltz, and every one of those was a waltz we didn't get.

But here is the other side, and Frank is the one who said it. At thirty we would not have gone. We'd have said we were too busy, and we were. We'd have been embarrassed, and we would have quit at lesson three, at the blister. At sixty you have run out of people to impress. You've been bad at things in public before and lived. You can stand in a circle with eleven other beginners and have a woman named Gloria tell you your elbows are wrong and you can laugh, because what's the alternative, and the alternative is to sit down for the waltz.

So: start at thirty if you're thirty. Start at sixty if you're sixty. Start at eighty-four if you're Walter. Just don't sit down for the waltz.

— Marion (and Frank, who read this and said "that's about right")

• The Community String Quartet — four amateurs who took up Haydn in their forties and fifties. They play Thursdays; we dance Saturdays. Same idea.
• Salsa Night! Beginner's Guide — Carlos and Yvette. We are not ready for salsa. Frank says "yet."
• Swing Dance Revival — Rob and Jenna are young enough to be our kids and swing is the one dance where they slow down for us.
• Line Dancing 101 — for the folks who come to the social without a partner, and a good time.
• Opera for Beginners — Gerald's page. We are beginners at everything else too.