And Then We Danced by Henry Alford

Author:Henry Alford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

2.

Because I caught the dance bug late in life (age forty-nine), it’s easy to view my doing so as an effort in part to stave off the ravages of time. This view is not inaccurate. Like a lot of people, I tend to think of myself as being perpetually thirty-one years old: seasoned enough not to commit the atrocities of adolescence and my early twenties, but not so old as to have cut off any of my options in life. I’d like to think that, if I really wanted to, and if I really committed myself to it, I could still become a novelist or playwright or pastry chef—because to believe in these possibilities is to live at the misty intersection between hope and faith, far from resignation. A lot of my other ships in life have sailed, but in the harbor, safe behind the breakwater of my delusion, I keep a small fleet, the sails of which are perpetually luffing.

Part of this magical-thinking mindset is the concurrent belief that a thirty-one-year-old’s optimism about life need not be supported by a thirty-one-year-old’s body.

I never said I was a realist.

* * *

I came to Zumba in 2011, as I mentioned earlier, via a writing assignment: my Times editor Laura was interested in hearing about the combination of Latin dance and cardio workout that, in 125 countries, has whipped some 12 million people into a lather. I was intrigued by the fact that you can fry to a crisp five hundred to a thousand calories per sweat-soaked hour.

I started on the zumba.com website. I learned there how, one day in the mid 1990s, the Colombian fitness instructor Alberto Perez, called Beto, forgot to take his aerobics music to a class he was teaching. Using instead some salsa and merengue tapes he had in his backpack, Perez started improvising what would attain immortality as Zumba. He moved to Miami in 2001 and was soon cranking out DVDs and an infomercial. In 2005 Perez and his business partners opened an academy to train instructors, of which there are now more than twenty thousand.

Typing my zip code into the website, I learned that there were 648 classes within five miles of me. As the Hollywood adage runs, you could die from the encouragement.

I consorted with the Z, as I came to think of it, for two months before writing about it, and then another six months after that. Most of my frantic gyrating and quick quick-stepping took place at New York University and at three Manhattan YMCAs. Though there are specialty classes like Aqua Zumba and Zumba Gold (a slower-paced variety for seniors), the great majority of Zumba classes are open to practitioners of all levels, and follow this format: an instructor arrives wearing stretchy black clothing and a facial expression of militant excitement; he or she turns on some music (lots of Ricky Martin and salsa, with a smattering of the Latin-Caribbean hybrid known as reggaeton) and wordlessly starts dancing. We fifteen or twenty

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