Club Cocomo or Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner

As I was browsing through my itunes the other day at work, I noticed that a coworker also had her itunes up. We are a small office and this was the first time I had seen anyone else sharing on our network.

To preface this I should say that this coworker, I'll call her Eliza, is a very quiet and unassuming attorney. She also managed to become a CPA somewhere along the line which suggests not a little studiousness and (<<yawn>>) ambition..... zzzzzzzz. SNORT...huh Oh, right...Anyway, another coworker of mine attended law school with her, and he told me that everyone thought that she was a foreign exchange student for the first month of classes because she never spoke up in class. She is very quiet in the office as well, and while never mean, she had never been exceedingly nice either. As a senior associate, she once sent me a rather curse email about how to format my client memo and attached a memo about it. Considering I had just started working here at the time and no one had ever shown me the memo before I had drafted it, I thought it was a little rude.

So anyway, back to the itunes. I open up Eliza's itunes, and what do I see? Oodles and oodles of salsa and merengue...and NOTHING BUT salsa and merengue. I was surprised...and intrigued....


As Eliza is leaving one day, I told her that I saw her music collection. She seemed a little startled, but then admitted that she enjoyed the music and that she and some friends would go to Club Cocomo from time to time to dance. They were going on thursday, and I was invited. I said "sure."

Now, I have taken salsa classes over the years, and made it to the end of the "intermediate" level in the last series I took about a year ago. I can hold my own generally, so i thought I would be in the clear with the silent Eliza and her friends.

What I didn't know however, was that Club Cocomo is not a place for novices. Sure, they have a class at the beginning, but this is the place where instructors come to social dance.

So we show up for the class at the beginning...and...hey...this is just the basic step....I know this stuff, this is easy, just a turn with opposing hands?...no problem...I'm better than all these people.

Then the class ends and the music gets louder and people start to fill the dance floor. The novices I was feeling superior to seem to have disappeared, being replaced by incredibly coordinated latin dancing machines.

I felt like I was in that scene in Dirty Dancing when all the people who work at that resort, or whatever the fuck it was, were dancing after-hours, and Baby walks in and is totally overwhelmed. That was me. I was Baby.

p.s. If there wasn't a scene like that in Dirty Dancing (I haven't seen it in awhile, ok? I'm straight for f's sake), there totally should have been.

Ahem....

I was so in over my head. I just kind of stood there and drank beer while men took Eliza and her friends out for a spin. Which was fine with me...I had no business on that dance floor. The girls did pretty well. I wasn't about to ask them to dance after they had been out there with Sexy Eyes Rodriguez. It would have been like having sex with someone after they've been with someone who has a really huge penis. They will compare you and you know in advance that you won't measure up.

That said, the experience (as well as the number of pretty latin girls) has inspired me to seek out new lessons. Club Cocomo, I will return triumphant!