Dance with the Dolly who'll Dance in her Stockings

I love it when I solve two problems in one stroke. Tonight, I got rid of the knee pain I've been getting when I dance.

How? I danced in my socks.

During the first dance, while I was wearing shoes, sharp pains in my right knee made me imagine having to retire from lindy hopping one day. But having read about runners correcting their foot and knee problems by running barefoot or in minimal shoes (see this and this), I tried an experiment: I took off my shoes. Since you have to be able to pivot without sticking to the floor, I kept my socks on.

My first impression was that I could feel the floor. Years ago, my dance teachers, Dan and Tiff, talked about the floor being the third partner in the dance. I finally understood what they meant. My heels, toes and especially the balls of my feet felt every step, slide and tap on the wood floor. But the pain in my knee didn't return.

One partner was concerned that I'd slip and slide in my socks, but it didn't happen in socks any more than in my dance shoes--a pair of sueded tennis shoes I bought for $5 from Tiff a few years ago. (They were a tad too small for her.) I did backward kicks a la Frankie Manning, and every other styling move I could think of, without a problem.

The other problem I solved tonight was finding dance shoes. Suitable dance shoes have to fit my wide feet, buckle or lace so they don't fly off, they have to be flexible enough to let my feet bend, they have to have a sole you can pivot on, or a sole that can be sueded, and I need to be able to wear them with either cotton socks or nothing so that I don't get blisters. Having shopped for such shoes, let me tell you: this is a tall order. It's time consuming, and decent shoes are expensive. It's probably why so many people in the swing scene wear sueded tennis shoes.

Drawbacks to dancing in socks? I'll have a little less protection when someone steps on my foot. Being stepped on by experienced dancers isn't so bad: they react too quickly to press very hard, and their flat shoes spread out the force. They don't step on people often since they keep their feet close to the floor. It's out-of-control newbies taking high, wide steps in stiletto and kitten heels that worry me. For the safety of everybody, I wish dance clubs would ban those shoes. One of my coworkers sustained a broken bone in her foot when someone stepped on her at a dance.

I suppose I'll look a bit odd, but so do a lot of people at the places where I dance. A few years ago, a friend and coworker was going to meet me at one of the clubs, but was put off by some people with purple hair. Besides, it's 2011, and the expectations of people who want current swing dancers to look like they fell out of an Andy Hardy movie are lost on 98% of us. If you really want to be period-accurate, though, some flapper or bobby soxer surely kicked off her t-straps or wedgies and kept on dancing at some point during the 30-year swing era. Smart woman.

Comments

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here . * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that L. plantarum may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have L. plantarum bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color. Special equipment Quar...

Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time

"I'd rather hold a girl in my arms than a football." -Joe DeCicco, friend and dancing fanatic Have you heard that it takes a woman 77 hours of exercise to lose a kilogram of fat? (For us Americans, that's half a pound.) That's according to a study cited by Dr. John Briffa .(1) The women who huffed and puffed three hours a week for a year ended up 4.4 pounds lighter than the sedentary women. That doesn't surprise me: my own weight loss involved a lot less exercise than what I'd been doing. I did no cardio workouts, just strength training . I had more time and energy for dancing, which is a stress reliever, helps keep me in shape, and it's a ton of fun. It's not expensive to dance (as long as you stay away from the studios). I've found excellent lessons at clubs where the teachers really care about the students getting it. Here in Denver, there are dancing clubs that are run by nonprofit organizations, where the prices are reasonable and...

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog