Dance Class
Last quarter I took a Caribbean dance classes on Sundays at the Old Town School of Folk Music, possibly my favorite place in all of Chicago.

We did painful ballet stretches and exercises for most of every class then cumulatively learned a routine for a dance recital that may never actually happen, as it has yet to be definitively scheduled and the class ended weeks ago.

I was sore in muscles I didn't even know I had every Monday. It was great.

This quarter I signed up for two classes. One is belly dancing, which I'm taking with my friend Felicia since she's in the magazine program and I'm a newspaper gal. We have suddenly gone from being in every class together to having completely opposite schedules in different neighborhoods.

I'm also taking hip hop, house and funk. I'd been hearing great things about the class and its instructor, a woman named Boogie. My first class with her fell on her 10-year anniversary of working at Old Town.

My class was her third of the day. It was packed with maybe 30 people, very different from my two- to four-person Caribbean class.

"Sometimes after teaching two classes I get in here and sound like I'm on crack," Boogie said. "But don't worry, I'm not on crack." The room was silent. "It's a joke!" she laughed.

She gave us the run-down on her philosophy for the class.

"What is the name of this place?" she asked.

A few people in the lackluster crowd, completely off balance with this bouncy woman, started to murmur, "The Old Town..."

"...School of Folk! Music!" she finished. "This isn't Tina's Dance Studio. This is about the music.

"This isn't a try-out for anything. I'm not even here to teach you something you can use in a try-out. I'm not here to teach you how to do the Soulja Boy."

She started jumping to one side and singing the song. "Supa-man!" she shouted sarcastically as she propelled herself forward in a flying pose.

"No, and I'm not here to show you how to dance like me. I don't want you to dance like me. I want you to dance like you... dancing. I want you to dance like you, dancing. If you start to look like me, you better change it up. Not too much, though." She laughed. "It's a joke!"

"I'm not here to show you how to shake your booty," she said, demonstrating. "You see that in hip hop videos, but that ain't hip hop. That's stripping."

She pointed to the wall-sized mirror lining one side of the room.

"You see that mirror?" she asked. "That is the scariest thing in the world, if you have the wrong attitude about it. If you come in here and try to do everything perfect, you will hate this class. You will leave this class in tears every day. But you know what? You already perfect.

"This is something I like to do at the beginning of every class. Go up to the mirror. Go right up to it."

We all stood and lined up in front of the mirror.

"Say it to yourself. I am perfect!" she yelled.

"I am perfect!" we all yelled, giggling.

"Say it again!" she said.

A single voice rang out in the silence: "You are perfect!" We all spun to see a girl in the middle still pointing at her reflection sheepishly. Poor thing. It was too funny not to laugh.

"No, all of you!" Boogie yelled. We said it again, still laughing.

Boogie had us turn this way and that and shake ourselves. "That's the worst of it," she said. "That's the most embarrassing thing I'll make you do."

One of the girls who had taken the class before whispered, "No, it's not."

The warm-up is always the same. "And we always start with house," Boogie said, "Because this is Chicago!" She turned on the music.

The veterans of the class had it down cold. I was utterly lost. Half of it involved clapping or bouncing or rolling your body in various stages of a stomach crunch and hurt like the dickens. I don't remember everything else she had us do, but at one point we did a push-up, after which we lay face-down on the ground with our knees bent and our feet in the air and had to pull ourselves forward then push ourselves back.

"It's a push-up and a pull-up!" Boogie yelled. "Oh no! What is she making us do?!" She laughed.

After that and other acrobatics I don't think I'll ever master, we started dancing. Boogie would run us a few steps at a time through a little routine then have us repeat it several times to music. We bounced back and forth, walked in circles, dropped down and shuffled back up and did the electric slide. It was hard to remember, but it was a lot of fun.

"This is not an aerobics class!" Boogie yelled at one point. She starting taking bouncy steps from one side to the other, clapping and leading with a dramatic duck of her head and flip of her thick ponytail. "I've taken aerobics. I know this is what they do. This is not aerobics. Be chill about it. Be cool." She switched to snapping, taking smaller steps with more lean. We laughed.

We stretched in pairs, then Boogie taught us to move across the room with a few different steps, using three different tracks of nothing but beats. Then she taught us another routine that combined the new movements with those from the first routine.

We did it a few times then she put on "Stronger" by Kanye West and had us do it faster. At the very end she split us into two groups and had one clap for the other. We had to limp off the "stage" at the end. It was hilarious.

"See, you all knew what you were doing!" Boogie complimented us at the end.

"Not me," I said to the second-timer next to me.

"You think you can't do it after the first class," she said. "But then you come back the second time and you can." Hope she's right. Even if she isn't, it's still fun.