About a week and a half ago, I decided
that I needed to get off my butt and do some swing dancing before I
got fat and flaccid. Ben said that checking Craigslist “activities”
section would be a good place to start, and lo and behold, there was
a guy who ran a small studio and needed partners. So I replied via
email to the guy's post, and a few days later, he told me to give him
a call. I was sort of skeptical, since I'm pretty sure most of the
people on Craigslist are sex offenders or something sketchy like
that. So I asked for a bit of background and maybe a website for his
studio. A week later, he sent a link to a half-finished website,
using an email registered under a pseudonym. That was a bit of an
“uhhhmm.......” moment, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt
(he is a swing dancer, after all!) and gave him a ring. We ended up
planning to meet on Saturday evening in the city, and then head to a
studio in Emeryville to try some moves out. He told me to meet him
at a cafe that was in a shopping center in Diamond Heights at 8pm, so
I hopped on a bus at about 715.
Before I left, I gave details of my
potential whereabouts and the guy's number and dance studio name with
Ben, so that if I did happen to end up dead in a ditch, the police
would have somewhere to start. My phone also died, so I borrowed
Ben's and asked him to call me at 830, to be sure that I wasn't being
actively abducted or something. So, like I said, I hopped on a bus.
The whole trip, I was like “Umm... this is pretty much exactly how
“Taken” starts......... but the guy is a swing dancer...
“Taken”..... swing dancer..... “Taken”.... swing dancer...
eurgh, this is such a bad idea.””
The bus dropped me off in Diamond
Heights, but I still had to get to the shopping center, which, as it
turned out, was a bit of a hike. It was actually only like 5 blocks,
but when they named the place “Diamond Heights,” they sure as
heck weren't kidding about the “heights” part. I'm pretty sure I
climbed more than the elevation of the entire state of Kansas in one
block. I'm actually not kidding. Every time I reached the base of a
telephone pole, the top of the previous one was level with my face.
It was literally straight uphill. And FREEZING COLD. The fog had
come in, which cools down the city a lot. So I had my leather
jacket, my new REI jacket, and then a t-shirt, but I was sweating,
but it was cold, so... conundrum.
After I climbed the third INCREDIBLY
STEEP hill, I realized that the directions on the map were wrong and
that the road I was supposed to be taking actually did not exist. So
now, in addition to meeting a potentially sketchy dude off of
Craigslist at 8pm in a shopping center I've never been to, at night,
in the cold, now I'm also lost. This sounds like the script to
pretty much every terrible horror movie ever made, except that I
don't have a bunch of dumb, loudmouthed friends with me. So I
trooped back down a block, over a block, and diddled around trying to
find this shopping center, which I eventually did. When I reached
it, I realized that the cafe I was supposed to meet this random
character at was closed. Cue more sketchiness. So I sat outside and
read a book and waited and pretty much froze to death and it was
probably the most ill-advised act I've ever done in my life.
Everything ended up being fine. I was
not roofied and taken advantage of, or abducted, or addicted to
heroin, or any of those horrible things that were flashing through my
mind. The guy turned out to be a pleasant, ex-Army chaplain who was
stationed at Fort Riley for a time, so that was kind of neat to make
that connection. When I mentioned the Big Red One, an infantry
division out of the fort, he said I must have dated my share of army
guys, which lead to the awkward “umm... I'm a pacifist... a
Mennonite...” discussion. But I whipped out a choice selection of
Mennonite jokes and it was all good.
So there you have it. I may have a
swing dance partner who is not a creepy sex-offender guy off of
Craigslist, so perhaps I'll get my swing fix in after all!
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