Salsa
by Clay Travis

Recently Lara has decided I need to learn how to salsa dance. Actually she was given the idea by our friend Derek (subject of a forthcoming column: why guys who don't want to be doing things feel compelled to get other guys to do them as well) She obtained my agreement six rum drinks deep at a bar when I made the mistake of subtly moving to the beat of an island song.

"We should learn to salsa," she said after the second drink.

"I dont really want to learn to salsa," I said still in complete control of my faculties.

After each drink, Lara resuggested we should learn to salsa. Four more completed drinks later, after a slight shimmy to a salsa-flavored beat, I succombed. As an aside, when I told one my coworkers about this he said, "That's how I ended up with kids."

Now we're salsaing. Which is a horrible decision for any guy to have made no matter how many drinks he had. And the upshot of it was this, Derek and his wife didn't even show up for the first class. When I saw him this past weekend, he said, "You really went?"

Basically salsa requires two things, 1. recognizing your salsa beat (which puts our teacher in the Bagger Vance/Will Smith role although minus the 1920's paperboy hat) 2. taking three steps during the course of four beats. You would think a dance that requires only two things would be relatively straightforward, however, I have discovered that I am adept at neither recognizing my beat nor taking three steps during the course of four beats. As a result I resemble a dog that can't quite grasp the fact that he has been neutered, I step forward, then backward, then forward then backward but no matter where I go there's no swing.

The worst part of it all is that our salsa teacher is very big on positive reinforcement. So during the course of the first class she said lots of things to me that sound like the compliments given to a baby minus the cooing when they are learning to walk,"You do really good stepping forward." and "That's ok, stepping backward is hard for everyone." and finally "Everybody has one true swing."[1]

[1] Even I'm uncertain if the comparisons to Bagger Vance are too much of a reach.