Dance With Me...If You Dare

We were at a really fun wedding last night, a category that most family weddings fall into. We know a large  amount of people, are happy to see them, and are genuinely happy for the parents  and the bride or groom, who we tend to actually KNOW.

At this age, much of the fun at the wedding is more about the socializing than the dancing (and sometimes, if we are feted correctly, the menu!), but we do our duty and get up to dance first with the bride, and then with her mother, or mother in law and/or grandmother. The dancing, once we get up from our seats, is quite enjoyable, except when it's not.

When is it not? well, let's see, I join the circle and on one side we hold a palm so sweaty it may in fact not be sweaty at all, but  perhaps this particular dancer came late, went to wash for the crusty challah roll on her plate, and before she could dry her hands (or make the bracha) heard the intense drumbeats and shrieking that herald the bride and groom's entrance onto the dance floor. She quickly ran to the circle, and perhaps that's when I, unfortunately, cut in to grab on to her dripping hand. Or she just sweats. A lot. The woman on the other side of me felt the need to hold her car keys. I'm not sure why. At first I thought maybe she had a problem with her hand, and that's how she protected herself, but I saw her later, holding her keys (which looked numerous enough to wonder if she was the lone night watchman at a prison. or a twelve year old boy) very normally. I had to wonder, with all of us who left our cell phones at the table, inside our fancy evening bags, why she couldn't do the same, but perhaps she was late in coming as well, and had no time to put them down.  What fun! Sweaty McSweatsweat on one side, and holding the crook of the arm of Warden McKeys on the other as we shuffle around the outer most ring of the dance floor. It didn't last long, beacsue a short, but very stocky woman noticed the bride's great grandmother standing at the side, and made it her duty to get her into the inner-most circle. A noble endevour indeed. Is it noble to LITERALLY PUSH people out of the way, and then hold them back as if she was the wall of water at the splitting of the Red Sea? Then there was Elbow Woman. She was convinced she knew me (she doesn't), and had to talk to me while we were dancing, but every time she spoke to me her elbows flew up and banged into my arms. She was tall and wiry, so her elbows were quite bony!

Then there was the usual, circle too fast, circle too slow, women changing the dance to something complicated, girls jumping and calling it dancing, and the requisite wiggling that is de riguer at today's function.

It really was nice, everyone was happy, even when the groom fell off the table he was held aloft and dancing on and after the wedding ended up with stitches and a shattered wrist.