Metamorphosis at the Dance Studio

I'm going to tell you something: I did not look pretty today. My hair is two weeks past the cut I'd promised it (I'm getting to it, I tell it). My clothes are the ones that aren't in the laundry room (sorry, but that means they are not my favorites). My mascara is tending toward globby.

I did not look pretty today, and yet I went dancing. Oh, poor Jean, I thought, as I went up those stairs. The things that man has to put up with. My chin too low on some rumba moves, my feet not yet always firmly planted, my New Yorker sneaking up on my ronde, and my hair. Never good, but even worse when it is two weeks past a hair cut.

Whatever. I'd worked through perhaps 100 emails, five drafts of different projects, and at least a dozen calls; there just wasn't time to deal with me. And I was about to apologize for it, about to make a bunch of lame excuses, but Jean is my good friend Jean. Jean, I realized today, is the kind of friend and dance instructor who can laugh with me despite how I look and not make me feel too flat-out unattractive to dance a cha-cha or a salsa.

That's friendship.