Dance lessons

About a year ago, I got a gift certificate for private dance lessons at Arthur Murray in Beverly Hills. The coupon is about to expire, so Mike and I finally started going. Our first lesson was today. We have been dancing together for 4 years now, and we always wanted to use this coupon, but in the last year of course we have both been in school. Combine that with the fact that BH is so far away, we almost let the coupon expire. But it was important to us so we made it over there. Even in the middle of the day it takes an hour to get there from our house. Then we have to find parking. The lesson is only 45 minutes, so it's hard to imagine that we'll continue the lessons after our freebies are up. Still, we liked our teacher, though he wasn't quite what I had pictured. He's about 25 and white, not gay, and talks with a ghetto accent like he's a rap artist. He said he's from Tennessee, and I guess that's where he learned to dance because he mentioned that some of the dance terminology we use in CA is different from what he learned. He complimented us constantly, but not like a sycophant even though I didn't believe everything he said since when we first danced for him I was being rather klutzy. It was just his style, he was very positive and never said "no, don't do it that way", but really smoothly taught us some new dances without ever making it appear that he was correcting us. He even taught us a new style of swing dancing that I'd never heard of before, and we had a good time and felt like we learned a lot in 45 minutes. He begged us to come to their open house dance tomorrow night, but since Mike has clinicals at 6am Saturday I don't think it will happen. I know a lot of people don't like the Arthur Murray system, but we felt like we learned something and weren't presented with high-pressure sales today. I guess we'll see what happens next week.