Cleopatra dances the salsa

I had such a busy night in dreamland that I feel like I just was at a triple feature.

I was in a group of my friends, mostly couples, touring around the country in a little VW bus.  It was a loose meandering agenda, ending nightly wherever we landed - motels on the freeway, cabins in the wilderness, with the occasional break to go into the nearest city to party like aging rock stars.

Most of my friends were straight but there was one other lesbian in the group.  On day four our bus passed through the small town where her girlfriend lived.  Before leaving to visit her girl she gave us directions to a dance hall where she had started taking lessons.  We all got drunk, dressed up and set off for the hall.

On the way there the bus got a flat.  One of the husbands hotwired a couple of motorcycles so that he and I could ferry people back to the hotel.  It turned out most people were lukewarm about dancing so in the end I went a straight girlfriend, whose husband stayed behind with everyone else to watch a game on TV.   

I met the salsa instructor and instantly hated her.  She was a heavily made up 60-something woman with died orange hair.   I asked if we could join the lesson - as it was the second week of beginner class and my friend hadn't danced in a while I wasn't sure.  Some instructors won't accept drop-ins after week one.  She looked at my friend and said "Oh.  No problem. I can teach you everything you need to know right here." She grabbed my friend by both hands and began raising and lowering her in the stairwell.  I saw that my friend was moving her shoulders too much and losing her frame but the instructor said nothing about it except, "Great. You're ready."

As we followed her down a hall, she became a stocky, energetic gay man in his 30s.  He offered some rapid-fire dance-and-relationship advice.  Right before we reached a door he turned to me and said, "You have very masculine energy.  I'm gay but I'm flexible."  Then he kissed my cheek and resumed her previous form.

She ushered us into a small, overly decorated waiting room lined with people, all over the age of 50, dressed as for an egyptian-themed ball.  They wore silver masks or heavy white and black makeup, black or purple velvet robes and a great deal of metal jewelry and accessories.  My friend was the most elaborately costumed of them all.  I felt a momentary self-consciousness in my short salsa dress and red dance shoes.

One by one, the different instructors came into the room and called out for their dance students.  People left to take waltz with a pot-bellied jovial man in a powder blue suit.  A 20something guy with spiky black hair and a pin-stripe suit vest Pied Pipered out an entire troupe of 7-and-8-year-old brownies who had apparently been hiding in the waiting room foliage.  They were dressed in uniform, badges and all, and emerged, holding hands in an unbroken line, like perfect brown paper dolls.

The salsa instructor had not reappeared, nor her queer male alter ego.  The egyptians were getting restless, fanning and fanning themselves in the close air of the room.  But nobody left.  We just stayed, and kept on waiting.