I had never thought of myself as a total and miserable failure on the dance floor. True, I never learned to dance, but it was not an issue in in 1968 or in 1970 when we danced twist or shake....you just had to do something, certain movements on the dance floor and look cool...no swirls or step sequences, no following somebody else's lead, no matching your steps to somebody else's, just dressing smart, looking good and following the music. Heck, I had even be called a good dancer ...by somebody even worse than me, I s'ppose.
"Las caleñas son como las flores"
That all came to an end in 1970. After that date I have not been able to dance, officially. I was declared a total block of wood with two left feet by people with fast gyrating hips and nimble feet who bore the remembrance of a thousand mornings woken up to the beat of bongo drums in their very dna. Oh, they tried to teach me, were very patient with me, but I was hopeless. My hips just didn't get it. The women of Cali were like flowers, but I wasn't one of them..
In the end it didn't really matter because I was an exotic bird in this landscape and there were people who liked that. I met a handsome, a little shy young man who wasn't a great dancer either. I did the right thing and married him, the only boy in Cali who didn't do salsa.
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