on salsa club

MIT Salsa Club for Advanced Beginners is open to the public, which, in other words, means that everyone and their mother (and their FOB(by) second cousin from India who is now in Engineering at a high tech firm in Cambridge, but really wants to attend 'the Harvard') attends and pretends that they are salseros. In a mere five minutes of salsa rotations, I had danced with aspiring salseros Sudesh, Sudeep, Arpanadesh, Vikram, Imran, Prakash and Tom (a small white boy who looked slightly out of place in the sea of brown). As anyone who takes a group dance class knows, it is almost mandatory to converse with your partner to fill the frequent awkward pauses (usually, when the instructor is going over the choreography with a giggly uncoordinated couple who are clearly in the wrong class). My conversation with Arpanadesh, went something like this:

A: Arpanadesh.
P: Nice to meet you.
A: Ah yes. Where are you from?
P: Texas
A: No, but where are you from?
P: Oh. India.
A: (Eyes bright with victory at discovering the truth) Aha, I thought so!

Similar conversations took place with Sudesh, Sudeep and the rest of my brethren. Need I REALLY tattoo 'I may appear Hispanic, but I'm actually from India' on my forehead? Other dance partners had their very own oddities. One moderately attractive Asian salsero drastically fell in my esteem when I found out that he designed office chairs for a living (and even further when he conveyed unnecessary excitement about mesh backs). Another older man asked if he could send me his resume so I could put it in the right hands at work. He spent so long putting my contact information in his phone (only a defunct email address, don't worry), that we missed the next dance move.

To my dismay, all of these men did have something in common: none of them actually knew how to dance salsa. In the space of 1 hour, my arms were twisted in unfortunate directions, my head was hit with multiple wayward elbows, and I was subjected to a combination of ghastly body odor and cologne, both of which make me gag. Will next Tuesday take my dancing shoes to Lobby 13, Building 13 (How clever we are with building names, oh MIT)? Updates will follow.