First first dance dance lesson

Dan and I just came back from our first "first dance" lesson! One of my aunts is a ballroom dancing instructor and my mom's been taking lessons with her for awhile, so we went over to my aunt's place tonight with my mom for our first hour-long lesson. We're practicing to the acoustic version of "Ever the Same" and learning a series of foxtrot steps (slow, slow, quick quick):

1. Two basic steps
2. One quarter turn
3. One promenade
4. One spin
5. One diagonal weight shift thing
6. Two quarter turns
7. Two karaoke step things
8. One arm swaying thing across two sets of four beats
9. One quarter turn
10. Repeat from beginning.

It was really fun! I've always liked taking dance lessons and had Chinese folk dance as my cultural class in Chinese school for years and years, with a few years of ballet when I was very little. Dan is not as much into the dancing but wants to learn to do this for the wedding and is trying really hard. Sometimes (in life) he'll get frustrated enough to lose his temper (rare) when he's not learning something quickly enough for his own standards, but we kept it light enough tonight to laugh about our various mistakes.

We'll have to practice a bit, but since it's not a particularly long or complicated sequence, it shouldn't take too long to make it smooth. I also like that it doesn't look too fancy, but still pretty and graceful. My aunt says that since we want to learn this for just one dance, it'll probably end up being around five lessons altogether.

My overall plan is to go with what Miss Manners said about the first dance more being about the couple opening the dancing, with the couple breaking off about halfway through to start collecting more people onto the dance floor. Look, it's even in the Wikipedia article on the first dance: "The 'first dance' of a bride and groom is a popular element at many post-wedding celebrations in modern European and American traditions. Exactly like an old-fashioned ball, the idea is that the bride and groom, as the guests of honor at a dance, open the dancing, not that they perform a choreographed duet for spectators."

I figure this helps us avoid the wedding-as-a-stage syndrome, gives us less to have to learn in order to fill up the time, and will also allow us to dance for a bit with our respective sets of parents without needing to do separate things like a father-daughter dance. And, this'll be one clear way to get people to start dancing. Some more ideas from 2000 Dollar Wedding on how to get people to dance:

• pick a very high energy first song and ask everyone in the wedding party to dance their hearts out to get the party started. Bridesmaid Cara has already volunteered her efforts for something along these lines (thank you).
• also ask a few trusted friends and family members to commit to dancing right away too (Emily N, Caitlin...I'm looking at you)
• start telling people way ahead of time to "make sure to bring their dancing shoes" and continually emphasize that you want the reception to be about the dancing so that when it comes to it, everyone already knows that's what was important to the couple and will hopefully partake
• if you want people to dance at your wedding, you should be out there dancing yourself
• get the kids involved: "About 20% of our crowd was kids, and I tried to dance with all of them. Kids usually love to dance, especially at a big party, and they really loosen up a crowd!"

In other bits of wedding planning news, I put up a big old countdown gadget on the right sidebar of the blog. Less than 100 days. Um, eek.

So I did cut out the muslin that weekend and even thread-traced the seam lines, but haven't yet sewn it up and fitted it (trip to visit college roommates in Boston, then recovering from that, then APW book club #2, then many social events this past week, blah blah excuses). That'll be my goal for this upcoming week. I should also really narrow down my ideas for the invitation designs and flowers and set up a few test runs.

We started pre-marital counseling last week, from a therapist I found through work. One of our benefits is to have five counseling sessions of any kind, for free, and evidently pre-martial counseling qualifies as falling under relationship counseling. It was a little awkward at first, but I thought the therapist was very good about just asking us questions to direct the conversation. We started with very general things, like why we want to get married, and then started moving into heavier topics like our ideas about what might make married life difficult. Nothing particularly new was unearthed for us, but it seemed useful enough to keep trying, at any rate. We have another session this week.

One thing I'm really looking forward to and crossing my fingers that it works out is a girls' weekend being planned jointly by Emily N and Abby. This is to be sort of like a bachelorette party, but minus any craziness and plus a lot more sitting around in our pajamas, watching sci-fi, crafting, and cooking. I read The Conscious Bride a couple months ago and while some of it was a little too New Age-y for me, the author did go on for some time about the importance of finding time to connect with the important women in your life before making the transition into married status.

I actually don't understand right now why getting married should change my relationships with my girlfriends in any way, but I don't want to miss out on time with them beforehand should I be wrong about things staying mostly the same. However, lots of these girls are grad students of one kind or another and would have to travel to get to the NYC area, so we'll see. I don't want to put pressure on people to have to fit in two trips to this area into their budgets and busy schedules, so if it doesn't work out for whatever reason, so it goes, but it would be a lot of fun to basically recreate the way I spent most Friday nights in college :)

You're The One That I Want

I'm in California for the week for work, and on the Caltrain into San Francisco this morning, 'You're The One That I Want' came up on my iPod and I thought, wouldn't this make a freaking awesome first dance song?

Here is my conversation with Dan over text message:

me: hey if we do a first dance could we do 'you're the one that i want' from grease? it's upbeat and catchy and we won't have awkward minutes of people watching us sway to some slow romantic song
dan: we'll discuss it
me: is that your way of saying 'no this triggers my hassle-causing nontraditional monitor but i am trying to not spoil your fun and shoot down every idea'?
dan: that's one interpretation of my choice of words

Actually Dan was more skeptical of the whole dancing thing at our venue and with our timing/choice of food, but I've seen photos online of people using the lower patio area as a dance floor. I will find a way to make it happen, I want dancing! Perhaps I will appoint Emily and Caitlin to be dance captains in charge of getting people to dance. Maybe that level of responsibility will distract Emily from her nefarious plan to get all my girlfriends to wear dresses of the same color so people think they are all bridesmaids.

Also, as with most ideas, it turns out this isn't nearly as original as I thought it would be. I've also never felt quite right about Sandy's makeover at the end of the film and it all feeds into the 'women must use their sexuality [strike 1] to force men to change [strike 2: men have to be changed] into marriageable material' thing. But, it's still fun and catchy (I couldn't get it out of my head all day today, kept bopping as I walked around SF) and it'd be funny, I think.

The sentiment would be a little bit more solemn for the ceremony, of course, though I think it's probably good to keep some levity in there too. As a life philosophy I try not to take myself too seriously. I really loved this quote posted by A Cupcake Wedding the other day, by David Sarasohn in an article titled, 'A Joint Account That Underwrites Our Marriage':

Being married to someone you respect for being somehow better than you keeps affection alive. That this impressive person chooses you year after year makes you more pleased with yourself, fueling the kind of mutual self-esteem that can get you through decades.

Dan does, in fact, make me want to be a better person, and a good chunk of my love for him is that he loves me. He is a fundamentally good person, and he chooses me. So I must not be too bad, too. The sentiment of 'you're the one that I want' turns out to be quite romantic after all, I think.

A link for my own future reference: various sample ceremonies at A Cupcake Wedding to peruse.