Lesson 2

Better dressed this time. I wore a technical shirt and, of course, my shoes with the newly mounted taps. Didn't feel quite so sweated up after.

The shuffle thing is actually called the Shim-Sham Shimmy. And it's got a little phrase to say, that has the rhythm of the step: "The Shim-Sham Shimmy is fun to do". Kinda corny, but it works. I am having a tough time with it. I'm supposed to end up on the left foot and more often than not I'm ending on the right, so something is missing.

This move is actually the break in a longer piece, and we started the first part of it today. It's got a THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-THUMP-thump-a-THUMP-thump rhythm that repeats three times and then goes into the break. The THUMP is a stomp, where you put your foot down, but don't transfer weight to it. The thump-a is a ball change (I think that's what it's called) which adds a bit of syncopation to it.

The Harry Connick number we worked through, but I don't think we added anything to it. That started to come together a little better for me, but the pencil turn is still not working. I think I almost pulled it off once, just at the beginning when we were playing around before the instructor got there. The trick seems to be to bend the pivot leg at the knee and push off, then keep the draggin toe beside you. I tend to keep it behind, so when I run out of spin, I have no leg under me to transfer to.

And then there was a marching kind of thing that I had forgotten about. Four marching steps, then two in half time, then a kind of forward shuffle where the relative positions of the feet don't change, but you kind of rock forward from foot to foot. It sounds pretty neat, especially when we all do it together. Today we added some kind of hoe-down thing, where you kick behind the other foot and slap it with your hand, then back the other way to slap it with the other hand, slap the knee, stamp the foot down, clap twice and shrug. Or something like that. It has to happen fast, so nobody gets it right, and it gets pretty hilarious.

And we did grapevines (again, I think that's what they're called.) Last week was the straight vine and the syncopated vine. Today was the half vine, which was a syncopated vine, but you only do it once before you change direction. It's really tricky because you have to do the weight transfer right to do the direction change. Otherwise you end up stumbling over yourself.

I find that I tend to slide around a lot. I've noticed the instructor takes rather small steps compared to the rest of us, so she doesn't have as much momentum to contend with on the direction changes. The rest of us are eating up the whole floor, while she seems to barely use half.

One minor annoyance: my shoes felt a little sloppy on my foot today. I had hoped that a good quality shoe wouldn't stretch too much, and I'm still hoping this is the case. But it seems slip-ons always go that way for me. I may have to improvise a lace sometime. I'd hate to lose one on one of those kick type moves. There's three walls of mirrors and one of windows, and I'd hate to find out what a flying tap shoe would do.