Herräng 6
- wildlife dancing sweden
On Friday, it was Pirates and Parrots night. I was not only sleep-deprived from previous nights, but also had finally caught the camp flu. Therefore, I decided to take a nap after dinner, and I really surprised myself by actually getting up again at 10 pm to dress up and go dancing.
The venue was decorated with palm trees, all imaginable kinds of pirate accessories, a jungle, a screen with a film of a muggy sea and a sailing ship in the background, and many more little details. People were dressed up as pirates, parrots, pirate ships, a flamingo, a beer keg, etc. I don’t remember seeing anyone of the hundreds of people dressed in regular attire.
But what really stood out was the bar. During the days a regular bar, it had been transformed by volunteers to a seamen’s watering hole with huge hand-drawn maps on the walls, shanty music in the background, old candelabra and rum bottles on the tables, and at some point the whole place singing along to a song which, naturally, had the chorus: Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum, accompanied by a fiddle. It was in the bar where I had a strange encounter. A guy I had been dancing with a couple of times that night and, as I later came to realize, for probably six dances in a row, came over to apologize for being rude, since he had left me on the dance floor a bit abruptly after our last dance. I have to add that it is unusual to dance for more than one (in the US) or two (Sweden, Germany) dances in a row with a stranger. But this guy and I had been chatting a bit earlier about dancing and were on similar terms about enjoying a dance as opposed to showing off one’s cool moves. He also did Balboa and helped me a bit practicing which lead to the first couple of songs in a row. We then did some Lindy Hop which was fun, too, and there weren’t many dancers that I clicked with on the dance floor. All good reasons for me to hold on to him as a leader, especially since there weren’t enough for all the followers. But when he left I didn’t think much about it and had a few dances with other leads.
So when he apologized later in the bar I told him not to worry, but then he seemed to want to say something more. Eventually, he did and left me speechless when he said that he had family and didn’t want to raise any expectations. Apparently, he mistook my interest in him as a dance partner for an interest of a different kind. All I could say then was Ok..?
On the one hand I find it very decent of him to be upfront about existing relationships and intentions or rather the absence of any intentions. But I was embarrassed and I do wonder what I did that made him think I was interested in him in any other way than dancing. I asked around, and my non-representative poll resulted in a number of dances with a stranger that you should not exceed in order to avoid misunderstandings: It’s 3.
