The Queen City Dancing Queen

So I realized a few weeks ago that a steady diet of Cheese Puffs was not going to take my body in a direction I’d like it to go. (As Margaret Cho once explained, I’m one of these people who can eat whatever I want—I’ll just get really fat.) I decided, therefore, to try an exercise group, as I can’t be trusted to exercise on my own, having neither willpower, stamina, nor actual athletic ability. I’d seen an ad in a local paper about this exercise group, the Queen City Dancing Queens (QCDQ for short), and thought I’d give it a shot.

I didn’t know what to expect—based on the picture of the owner featured in the paper, I was kind of thinking that the class would be full of smoking hot, very coordinated women. As I learned at my first week, when I slinked through the door and took up my position at the very very back of the class, the QCDQ were indeed smoking hot coordinated women, although the peak years of their smoking hotness ranged from 1965 to the present. Probably half of the women are older than me, and half are my age or a little (or, ok a lot) younger.

But whatever their age, these are mostly women with a fair amount of life experience and--I’m going out on a limb here, but I think I’m right—childbearing experience under their spanx. None of us would have passed Stacy and Ken’s What Not To Wear test, as most of us had on outfits that maximized every bulge. A lot of us had on pants with tassels on the bum, and pockets on the thighs. But that was totally ok. As I learned very quickly, these women were not here to judge each other—maybe it has to do with selection bias, but the Mean Girls don’t hold sway here. These ladies eat the Mean Girls for lunch, and wipe their hands on their tasseled Zumba pants.

After my initial reaction of dismay when Ester Dean’s “Drop it Low, Girl” blared out over the speaker, I realized that—hey—my girls can DANCE! And those of us who were new were waaay too busy trying to keep up to have any energy left for being snarky. It’s all about shakin’ what your Mama gave you—which is something new for me. Most of those ladies were probably taught, as I was, that our bodies don’t matter—that in fact bodies are corrupt, impermanent time bombs. They exist as the vehicle for the spirit; the body is to the spirit like Fred Flinstone’s car is to his feet, or a bowling bag is to the ball. Maybe that’s true, or maybe it’s not. But I know that what I saw at the QCDQ Dance Out was a group of women who might not be seen on the street as beautiful, but in this context were inspirational. A whole rec center full of Upper Paleolithic Aphrodites, as it were.

So now I have a new goal: I want the tasseled pants. And the chops—and panache—to wear them.

Check it out (scroll down for the video)
http://www.queencitydancingqueen.com/