I was not really expecting what I got. I thought I was getting myself into more of a Jane Austen-type scene, with skirts and reels and bowing. So please imagine my surprise when we pulled up to the “Dance-Mor” in Swisher, Iowa and I saw 10 legitimate looking cowboys leaning against the building, smoking like chimneys. I clung to my hopeful delusion and thought that maybe they were just simply local color who enjoyed dances from the 1800s.
This delusion was quickly dispelled when my friends (who apparently knew exactly what we were getting in to) and I walked through the doors to hear an electric guitar make itself loudly evident. We exchanged our $6 for tickets from a severely bearded man and walked through the double doors into everything I was not expecting: Oversized belt buckles (regardless of gender), oversized cowboy hats, flannel, WalMart chic, cowboy boots, and dim lighting. Despite my reservations about the government telling me what to do, I silently thanked them for the Iowa Clean Air Act.
As we walked further into the fine establishment that is the Dance-Mor, I realised what kind of dancing I was expected to do: Synchronized. I have a pretty well established phobia/general ineptness at synchronized dancing, which was made especially evident when I attended a Zumba class and ended up in tears. I found a chair and made myself responsible for watching over everyone else's sundries. And then, just to make sure every person in the room knew that this girl, dressed as I was in non-cowboy boots/hat/flannel, did not belong anywhere near a dance hall in Swisher, Iowa, I began to crochet a scarf.
All in all, it felt like a high school dance except with beer and very little grinding. But I did have fun, mostly because it was just so entertaining to be expecting one thing and to get the complete opposite. Like that one time when I drank milk and thought it was going to be Mountain Dew. Yeah, kind of like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment