Escapade by Janet Jackson

I have always been (and continue to be) envious of people who can dance.  I can mostly follow the steps, but I always struggled whenever I took a ballroom class because I had trouble following the guy.  Mostly, I never feel very graceful or inspired.  I don't have whatever it is you need to just go with the music and move your hips spontaneously, or create some amazing maneuver with your body.  Maybe it's because I am calling dancing "maneuvers" rather than some fluid piece of art.

In elementary school and junior high, a lot of the popular girls were in dance.  I think it was mostly jazz dance.  They would perform these really neat routines to a fun, trendy song at school talent shows.  I would go home and try to remember the moves and copy them, but never really succeeded.  In junior high, there was a segment of our P.E. class called dance.  In 8th grade, our teacher chose the song Escapade and we broke into groups to create a dance.  I remember being in a group with Christina P (her nickname that year was Tiscrina) and some other girls.  We were so excited about our dance.  It wasn't the best dance and definitely not the most creative as we were all at my level of dance ability.  I think it mostly included some grapevines and other really basic moves like that, but what was important is that we loved creating it.  We practiced it at lunch, we taught it to our other friends.  We performed it to the very best of our abilities in P.E. and we probably got an A.

We practiced with a cassette, because of course, it was 1991.  The teacher would have to quickly press stop and rewind every time the song ended so we heard the beginning of Black Cat (which came immediately after Escapade) quite a bit.  I remember the teacher commenting that Black Cat sounded like an even better song and she was right.  In fact, I got to play it years later with the Cal Band, complete with hip thrusts and circles, although it didn't sound the same since it is supposed to follow Escapade.  I miss that about music nowadays - you never know what to expect!