10/3/2002 » Dance

Tonight I was just skewered on the dance floor, my first partner walked off mid-dance with a kind but firm 'ees okay.' I'm in no-man's-land between West Coast and East Coast salsa right now, they are different timings and different styles, and she voted with her feet :) Mighty embarrassed, I went online to check out dance classes.

In the Bay Area you generally get classes just two times a week at a club with two instructors. But here, there are two major studios with thirty instructors each. Classes are on the hour every hour from 6-10pm, nearly every day of the week. There's not just one salsa class: there's club salsa, on 1, on 2, Cuban style, Palladium style, styling, shines, hustle, mambo, merengue, and cha-cha. Then there's an entire menu for swing and one for ballroom...

The other day I went looking for dance shoes. Those are lightweight Oxfords with pointy toes for rapid footwork and leather soles for easy spins. I found there is not one dance shop, there are seven in the immediate vicinity... Capezio, Menkes, Sansha, LaDuca, and on and on. I walked to four, all just north of the theater district, before getting tired.

The guy who made the shoes for Savion Glover on Broadway and for Catherine Zeta-Jones in the film version of 'Chicago', Phil LaDuca, sells shoes to the public out of a tiny shop on 39th & 9th. Menkes even sells handmade flamenco shoes assembled in Madrid.

I find this all just ... astonishing.