The famous St. S professional dance troop - or not!

If you remember I wrote sometime ago about having a busy weekend, what with theatre on the Friday night, a day trip to Turin on the Saturday and our local neighbourhood clean-up/BBQ on the Sunday.  What an exhausting weekend that was, but very pleasurable indeed.

As I said, after the clean-up of our little neighbourhood of around 25 houses, we got together to have a pot-luck BBQ.  In addition, just one week before my immediate neighbour's hedge had caught fire while his son was weed-whacking and about 10 families dashed out and for 30 minutes or so fought the fire until we brought it under control.  Man, hedges go up like - well tinder I guess.  It was and has been scorching hot (over 100 degrees) so I suppose we shouldn't have been surprised, but everyone pitched in and helped to get the fire out in the nick of time.

So, this particular neighbour cracked out the champagne at the BBQ to thank everyone for their help.  Add to that, there was plenty of other booze, good food, noise and sunshine, so all in all a lovely day.

However, I learnt to my cost that when said neighbour's wife mouths at you over the noise while doing a little jig, you must - on no account - nod your head in agreement!  Seemingly, what I had agreed to was to attend a lesson (stage in French) for tap-dancing on the evenings of 6th and 7th July for 2 and 1/2 hours a time!!!!  BUUUUUT I wasn't the only one.  All together we ended up being 6 "budding artists" who had agreed to go with her to a tap-dancing stage!!!  Now she has been taking tap lessons for the past year and loves it and, generously, thought we might too, so at the BBQ she took down names for the stage, signed us up and paid for it.  Bloody hell.  It has been consistently over 100 degrees for the past while here so who the hell wants to flail around for 150 minutes (non-stop) doing their dying swan impersonation in that?

But since I secretly had visions of ending up like this:

or even like this:

I put my money where my mouth was and went along.

WELL!  I don't know how I didn't snuff it.  But it wasn't just me.  It was SOOOOOOO hot, no air, and the teacher went SOOOOOOOOOOO fast and barely stopped to let us drink.  After a while I tried discreetly tap-dancing out the front door but he always caught up with us and hauled us back.  I did manage to grab my friend's 14-year old daughter and we tap-danced into a cupboard hoping he wouldn't notice, but no, we got dragged back in again.  I don't think I have ever sweated so much - none of us in fact.  But, I have to say, we had the greatest evening in fits of giggles, being a bunch of (mainly) middle-aged, overweight neighbours who all had our sense of rythmn amputated at birth!  We were in hysterics by the time we crawled walked back home.

I have to admit we looked more like this:

 

 

Er not even actually. (That photo is taken from the Liza Minelli movie "Stepping Out" - which I can highly recommend btw).  To say the least, we were crap artistically challenged!!! But what a fun evening it was.

 

However, I think the next time I'll stick to tiddlywinks.