Tall Women Really Can Let The Man Lead

We’re arranged in lines, almost 50 men and women trying to flow like the teacher who’s way up in front of the room. Step forward, knee bent, and keep your weight on the back leg. It’s the opposite of walking, she says. Don’t swing your hips. Just roll your knee inward as you step.

We watch the techer. We lurch to one side, then another. We don’t dare look at ourselves in the mirror, just watch the teacher as she shows us the “latin motion.” It’s the first step to learning the rumba. The music comes on. We lurch to the beat.

“Now take your partner,” she says. And my hands get damp.

This is ballroom dancing class at Spokane Falls Community College with Harriette Kamp, who’s taught here and at Gonzaga University for two decades. For almost three years, I’ve taken a weekly lesson, sometimes with my husband, sometimes with other partners when he’s not free.

And I have learned in my 40s what children learn every day. How to do something entirely new. How to get your body to move in ways you’re not quite sure about. How to keep trying as the teacher watches you.

Harriette is the drill sergeant of our classes. She wears a headset microphone, like Madonna does, so she can move around the room and keep us on beat.

There’s no hiding from Harriette. “Men! Pick up your feet!” she commands the beginners, and every guy in the room starts marching like a half-time performer at a football game.

“Ladies, don’t let your wrists droop!” Now that’s a problem I never thought about before. I’ve had other problems, though, with dancing.

Meadowlark Elementary School, Great Falls, fifth grade. Our teachers decided that we Montana kids needed to learn social dancing. So, instead of P.E. class, we were paired up, boy and girl, in the gymnasium. Waltz, fox trot, cha cha cha.

It was a horror. Worse, there weren’t enough boys. I don’t believe the teachers really thought much about their solution: Make the tall girls dance the boys’ role.

I was the tallest girl in school.

For long, tortured weeks, we tall girls (secretly wishing we were petite ballerinas in pink tights and tutus), learned a different dance from the other girls. We learned to lead.

Looking back, it was an appropriate though unintended life lesson: Don’t wait for the man to decide whether you’ll turn left or right, whether you stay in one spot or promenade across the room.

Learn to lead.

But, every now and again, at a New Year’s Eve party or a wedding, I would lead when I really needed to follow. I stepped on a lot of toes. I was back in the fifth grade. I stopped dancing.

Three decades later and tired of the fifth grade, I wound up in Harriette’s classes. I stepped on even more toes. Once I even whacked my poor partner in the nose with my albow. “That’s OK,” he said. “My last partner scratched me in the face.”

Slowly, things changed. The “latin motion” got easier. I discovered that we had some waltzes among our CDs at home, plenty of them if you listen to George Jones or Emmylou. I heard a rumba beat for the first time on our Stan Getz/Joao Gilberto tracks.

Now I know that a tall woman can learn to let the man lead. It takes trust - trust that your feet will do what someone else decides, that your head doesn’t have to be in charge all the time, that Harriette isn’t watching you just now. I’ve learned that you can be graceful even though you may tower over most men.

Ballroom dancing means you have to let everything else drop away for a while, get close enough to touch someone else and move to a beat - the kind of things most of us don’t do very often in our busy lives.

There’s a whole dance world in Spokane that my teachers at Meadowlark Elementary never imagined: One couple here played the tango scene from “Scent of a Woman” over and over at home until they figured out each step. They’re better than the movie.

Another couple put in a dance floor on the second level of their new home, black and white vinyl tiles, and lots of windows overlooking the lake.

At our home these past few years, the living room furniture gets pushed back at midnight for practice. Maybe someday we’ll just leave it that way.

, DataTimes MEMO: Peggy Kuhr is Managing Editor for Content at The Spokesman-Review.