Wild Country

I make it a personal policy to try everything once, because you never know it could be my new favorite thing. This was my mom's advice to try to get us to eat new foods when we were kids. Actually, it was never our new favorite thing, and often it was terrible. "It's not my favorite" was the coached reply.

Anyway, a friend invited me to go line dancing with a group and since I'm always interested in new places and new things, I said yes. To my credit, I have, in fact, line danced once before- at the wedding party of my cousins who threw an absolutely fantastic reception which resulted with the entire family being summarily ejected from the hotel ballroom, but that's another story.

The line dancing was at country dance hall "Wild Country" in Collinsville, Indiana, which is about a 30 minute drive out of St.Louis. I arranged a ride from a friend and actually wasted a lot of time trying to figure out if I wanted to wear the nice cowboy boots or my everyday cowboy boots, if I wanted to go with the slim, fitted white shirt or keep it grungy with the thin country style shirt. To bolo or not to bolo, hat is the question.

Turns out anything would have been fine. Most guy there had untucked button down shirts, and everyone had jeans. Many wore caps and fewer wore cowboy boots. A lot of western plaid. Lots of short skirts on the ladies. The place was really in the middle of nowhere, next to the tri-county walmart, in a garishly painted concrete box with a huge, mostly full parking lot out front. Through the security wanding, through the ID check, through the cashier for the cover. It was a $15 cover, which is kind of ridiculous- apparently a B list country music performer was doing a show, someone who, gasp, had been on American Idol.

The inside was great. Neon, lasers,black lights, a giant disco ball, a huge dance floor surrounded by wooden railings, NASCAR playing on the flatscreens, shot stands and small bars distributed around, and a second floor balcony which ran around the entire interior. In lieu of smoke, there was a constant wafting in of fog from a smoke machine high above the floor. I'd broken my $20 I'd brought as spending money mostly on the expensive cover, so I picked up a pitcher of Miller High Life to share with some of the people I was with. $4.50 for a pitcher of beer isn't bad- it's too bad the beer sucked so much.

I danced some. Line dancing isn't really my thing. It might as well be step aerobics. I like dancing that is a little more personal. The vast majority of people there were pretty good. Some of the dances were really fast and complicated. There were a few people who were fantastic dancers, although most of them were pretty competent. A few, like our group, stumbled and flailed around, stomping at inappropriate times, and generally trying not to run into other people. We pretty much danced from 10 until 2, when the floor started to clear out a bit.

The musical selection was really strange. Some people say, 'oh I like anything but country and rap' and that was about all they played. I noticed they got real urban after midnight, and I heard everything from George Strait to Michael Jackson to Flo Rida. I was kind of surprised. If country is your thing, I wouldn't expect you to be a fan of rap.

Overall, fun. But I still can't get studio out of my head. At this point, there's very little than can be done for it, and I expect that if I work hard an produce a lot, then I can salvage a B- out of the ruins. School is an unpleasant and unhealthy obsession.