Today was the first meeting of Koleinu, but I’m not going to do it this year. There’s just not enough time during the week to get things done after work. But it was my sister Sari’s yahrtzeit, so we went to Temple Emanuel to say kaddish. Israeli dancing has been meeting Thursday evenings over most of the summer. We stayed for it, and still got home earlier than I would have been home from Koleinu.
There are two women who swap off leading the Israeli dancing. The leader tonight was Pam, whom I prefer. She may not be quite as graceful a dancer as Joan (I heard K. D. Lang talking about her song “Big Boned Woman” on the radio a couple of times this week — that could apply to Pam), but I find her a far far better teacher. Joan will teach the very basic beginning steps and then go on to teaching complex advanced dances at a pace that is OK for the advanced dancers. Pam is willing to review some relatively simple dances and to play a lot of them, and when she teaches a new dance she goes over the steps many times, until nobody asks for another time through.
So what I’m saying is, I got to dance a lot more than most times. Now I’m considering taking the class with Arlene Friday mornings at the JCC.
later… Arlene was just watching “Weeds” in the other room. I heard one of the dance tunes we did, went in to see if it was one of her dance CDs or the TV, and, TV, with a scene of dancing at a Jewish wedding (well, I didn’t stick around long enough to be sure what kind of celebration). The show gets extra points for using some music other than the H song!