Everyone has that bar. The one that you drive by almost every day of your life, or pass by every time you drive down a familiar highway. And every time you ride by it, you think to yourself how you and your friends need to go in there, no REALLY, this weekend WE’RE SO GONNA DO IT!
Of course, you never go online to check out exactly what type of bar it is, so you end up walking into some sort of freak show fetish gathering where everyone is sporting Hello Kitty and singing Raffi songs in edible undies.
This past weekend, Carla, Kristen and I headed on over to a local bar & grill. Since before we were 21, this had been Carla’s ‘gotta see’ bar. So it worked out perfectly when the man Kristen is seeing asked us to meet him and his friends here. Perfectly, that is, until we pulled up to the place.
Cowboys. Fancy hat wearin‘, country music lovin‘, tight jeans huggin‘, honest to God cowboys. And they were linedancing.
The last time I had seen anyone linedance was last summer when I worked on the Antiques Roadshow with Tiffany. We walked into a gay club called Woody’s and saw about 30 gay men and women lined up in grid formation. All of them wearing fitted shirts, designer jeans and cowboy hats. They all matched one another, and they were all linedancing to dance club remixes of Madonna and Britney Spears. Tiff and I commenced obsessing.
Being around gay linedancers and being around cowboy linedancers are two very different things. The glaring disparity being that the gay linedancers are a lot more accepting of…well…gay people, whereas I have a slightly less cuddly feeling about the cowboy ones. Southern hospitality and all.
I was adamant that the only people I’d interact with are the ones I came there with. And the only choreographed moves I’d make were from the bar to the bathroom.
Skip ahead a few hours and a few beers, and you’ll find Kristen and I on the dance floor being taught linedancing by a group of women in the 55-65 age group, being encouraged to attend the Wednesday classes and invited into the dance circles by passing couples.
The sad thing is that we are planning to actually attend these lessons. And while some of reason lies in actual fun inherent in linedancing [yes, FUN], the real reasons are a deep-seeded jealousy and an insatiable ego. Kristen and I love to dance, and to be in a club where we are perhaps the only two people who CAN’T keep up with everyone else is just plain unacceptable. So our goal is to master linedancing, shame the other linedancers with our superior grace, skill and foot tapping, and then go on with our lives.
And as a closing note, I think there’s a few words to be said about groups of people dancing in sync with one another in colorful, coordinated outfits consisting of tight pants and big hats. And none of those words are synonymous with ‘heterosexual’.
