Ok, so the reality is, I'm here mostly because I was encouraged to start blogging about my experiences learning lindy - among them, my observations of people around me.
So, in what will likely be a recurring theme here; I bring you the Annoying Follower series. There will also be similar reflections on the good followers as well - because I hope to send them here one day and I'd like them to feel positively highlighted.
I'd like to point out that to make this list, a follower would have to be doing something -terribly- wrong; and not just wrong, but damned near maliciously wrong. Simply being a poor dancer isn't enough - I'm not catty; these are people who really put in the extra effort to be annoying to dance with. As such, I'm leaving out people that I only just don't enjoy dancing with - this blog needn't highlight people I just don't find graceful - this list is for the truly obnoxious.
Last thing I want to do is be the guy known for bringing more negativity to the already small and drama-loaded dance scene; so I intend to try damned hard to keep this to extreme examples (and to genuinely funny mistakes, which certainly will put ME squarely in my own sights!)
The current Crew of Annoying Followers (The AF Crew, from here-on-out):
Galloping Girl: So-named because she gallops to make up for her small (sub-5') stature... which would be fine, except she gallops about four feet past where she should be at any given step. Which means, she's not just a stretch to dance with because she's annoyingly short (a forgiveable sin), she's also dragging your arm away. And yes, if you hadn't guessed, she doesn't follow ANY lead. EVERY dance with her is a guess at what new bizarre thing she's going to do to make this dance harder. Predicts lead and doesn't follow, can't feel or hear a beat to save her life, gallops through steps to points well out of range of lead, and lately... just before critical points in turns, steps out of momentum in opposite directions (LOVE this!! ).
FishyFace: So-named because the entire time I've had to dance with her, she was making a fishy-face at her boyfriend across the room. Let that sink in a moment. This girl can't be more than like 19, or at least she acts and looks like it, and she dances about as well as you'd expect from someone who doesn't pay attention during the lesson or the partner practice. Which is to say, terribly. She must be an amazing photographer, because I can't see any reason any sane boy would be seen in public (let alone dance) with this girl unless she had some rather Ansel-Adams-level-of-detail blackmail photos.
Backfist: Our most recent inductee. So-named because despite after just hearing in the lesson, replete with an excellent demonstration of truth, that when doing a free-spin the follower need only keep their hand in the same position during the spin... she decides to tuck it in to her chest. I've studied martial arts for close to seven years of my life; even my amphetamine-tricked reflexes weren't fast enough to catch her arm shooting out from her happy place at the last millisecond in the spin. So I did what any sane person would do; gently corrected her by saying "You just need to leave your arm in the spot it was when I let go of it".
Her resulting response is what gained her notoriety and her AF Crew badge - she gets offended at being corrected (god forbid she's doing something the teachers just told her not to do), and instead of leaving her arm in the same spot during the spin, she turned it into a spinning backfist, properly executed here. ( goto 1:10) Yeah. It's a damned dangerous thing to even joke about, and if she does it again, she's gonna find out what a hard rising block does to a wrist... no way I'm getting intentionally KO'd on a dancefloor.
Bringing truth to 'Dance like no one's watching', I give you -
Pendulum - "Slam"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABqh9N-Mw5E&feature=related
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