Love Stories: Rick and Julie

Julie and I met at a dance class. Nothing fancy, a drop-in ballroom dance class in what had been a high school gym. We had both gone there before, but hadn’t been lucky enough to come on the same night. There were perhaps a hundred people there, in two concentric circles, men on the outside and women on the inside. You would rotate to the next partner after they taught you a few steps of the waltz, so you could get experience dancing with different people. Well, that was how it was supposed to work, anyway.

When I got paired up with Julie, we had a great time. She was beautiful and had a great laugh. We also had the same idea about dancing, namely to have fun. So if we screwed up our steps at times, we laughed it off and tried again. This girl, I thought, was too much fun to wait for 50 turns to reach again. So I began slipping around from just after Julie to just before her in the circle, much to the confusion of other dancers. Luckily, she wasn’t a stickler for the rules either, and we got to enjoy each other’s company quite a lot during the lesson.

Then came the free dance after the lesson, where we could try out all sorts of dances with anyone we wanted. Julie and I spent most of that together as well, lucky me, laughing and talking as we, um, tried out our dance moves. They say that dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal urge, and let’s just say all signs were favorable. Also at the dance was Julie’s former roommate, who was visiting from out of town. After the dance, we all went out for coffee. I guess I passed muster and got a favorable review from the ex-roommate, because we got together for dinner a couple days later. One thing led to another, and twenty years later, we’re married and still sappy.
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Rick and I've known each other for a thousand years, more or less. He's a tremendous, dear friend and I'm happy as a sneaker full of clams at high tide to say that Julie is too.