Because You Can Call Us Twinkletoes

I haven't written anything about the wedding in a while, so I thought I'd go back to that for a bit.

 

On our engagement night, my Mama slipped an envelope in Alec's shirt pocket and said, "Ok, we may embarass you, but you're not allowed to embarass us!" They gave us money for dancing lessons. I laughed a little about this, because I never really thought about being too serious about our first dance together. But we had talked in the past about taking some ballroom lessons together for fun, so this sounded like it could be a good time.

 

Of course, our first hurdle was to find our First Dance Song. Turned out to be pretty easy. For Valentine's Day, Alec had bought us tickets to the Elton John/Billy Joel concert at the Ford Center (now the Oklahoma City Arena, soon to be the newest shrine to Chesapeake Energy). In a strange twist of fate, I had entered a contest shortly before Valentine's Day and after he had given me this lovely present, I won two tickets to the concert. So, we sold two of the seats and used the better ones. We're both Billy Joel fans, so we snuggled up when he sang, "Just the Way You Are." It became our song. And, when we began the wedding planning process, the big winner in the First Dance Song race.

 

So, come October, we made an appointment at DanceMakers in Oklahoma City to get our groove on. We met with Mercedes, a tiny bundle of suave-ness who managed to make us look good. We had three lessons with her in which she taught us our routine and practiced it with us. In between, we had three practice sessions on our own in the studio. She worked with our awkwardness until we finally began to have some fun with the rumba, and with each other while rumba-ing. Our practice sessions were interesting as we each tried to play coach to the other one and, let's face it, I don't take coaching too well. But we left with smiles on our faces at some aspect of the evenind and DEFINITELY got to know each other better!

 

The end result was a choreographed routine that we tried to make look less choreographed. We actually messed up a few times after our perfect run-through before we walked down the stairs at the reception (totally perfect, spot on!), and the version of the song was not the one we practiced with. Just a note--if you're practicing a routine, always provide your own music! But we laughed our way through it and made an amazing memory on an incredible night that went by waaaay too fast.