one of my fave austin memories so far

thursday night i decided to face the music and accept that the texas license plates on my little acura are not a hallucination and that i am, in fact, an actual resident of this crazy state... and that i would embrace my texas-ness and do something that was authentically texas and completely removed from the urban city life that i had once led...

...so, naturally, i decided to go line dancing.

yes. you read that sentence correctly. i went FREAKIN' LINE DANCING (although technically speaking, i guess it wasn't really LINE dancing so much as texas two-steppin' and country-western swing... but line dancing has more shock value, so there you have it).

this coming from a girl who used to get all gussied up (heh) in tight jeans and high heels and cute little tops with dangly earrings and clutch purses to go swill $14 martinis and hob-nob with the ambitious DC crowd. instead, i put on a thin fitted t-shirt, some jeans, and my new cowboy boots and headed over to the broken spoke (home of the disgusting chicken-fried steak that megan and i had sampled a mere week ago) with my buddy paula for some dancing lessons and live country music.

and you know what? we had an absolutely fantastic time. the "dance lesson" was about an hour long, and they taught us the texas two-step as well as some basic country-western swing moves. amusingly enough, the men outnumbered the women, so us girls took turns dancing with the different guys so that no guy would have sit out for more than one dance in a row. after the lesson, we drank shiner blondes and chatted while we waited for the band to set up (some of our other buddies had joined us... actually, it was me, aka a korean kid from the DC 'burbs, one canadian, and two irish kids... what a motley, non-texas crew eh??).

once the band got started, the dance floor was pretty much packed for every song. we two-stepped, we spun in circles, we ducked under our partner's arms and pretty much had a boot-scootin' good time (oh my lord i can't believe i just used that phrase). i had a bunch of different dance partners (there is something undeniably charming about a man asking you to dance, whether he's sporting a cowboy hat and boots in some texas dance hall or a pair of fitted jeans and fly-ass pumas in a dark DC club), although i must say that the best dance was with my friend paula... we realized that neither of us are any good at playing the boy and leading and decided to spin each other around the dance floor for the entire song instead.

(the second-best dance was with this portly gentleman who had a GINORMOUS beer belly, and although he was a smooth dance partner and strong leader, i had to bite my lower lip the entire time to keep from giggling at the fact that his belly was doing more of the work of leading me around the dance floor than his hand on my back.)

many hours and many beers later, we headed home, exhausted and sweaty and completely satisfied. am i true texan? absolutely not. i love that i lived in a big city and will still put on my tight jeans and high heels for a night of martinis on the town (in fact, that's exactly what paula and i did the very next night). also, i still couldn't help myself from noticing that i was one of the few non-whities in the place and that i never would have been caught dead in that kind of place back home. but hey, why the hell not, you know? i learned the texas two-step, danced my pants off, rocked the hell out of my new cowboy boots, drank piles and piles of beer, and realized that i don't have to take myself so seriously all the time...