I was going to entitle this, “You wouldn’t believe who I bumped into on the dance floor,” but, eh.

Turns out a ball is a lot more fun if you know how to do a couple dances, even if the band plays such lame songs so lamely you get an uncontrollable urge to walk around the dance floor clocking every single dancer with a gigantic hardwood mallet, yourself last of all.

Luckily I didn’t have a mallet.

We had a table upstairs, overlooking the dance floor. We had a bottle of wine with friends, and lots of mineral water. We drank so much water last night in fact that although we also had champagne and wine, neither of us had a trace of a hangover this morning.

We went downstairs and danced. This was the students’ ball – so lots of high school seniors attended. Young people are so beautiful. You young? Chances are, you’re beautiful in one way or another. Anyway.

We danced a couple dances. Luckily we bumped into friends (literally) who are good dancers. As a new song started, they told us, “foxtrot” or “generic dance” or “this one’s a cha-cha-cha.”

So we were competent at some of the dances, a huge improvement over last year, when I sort of had to hide in the most crowded parts of the dance floor, hoping no one noticed that my feet were following no particular pattern.

The bar was incredibly smokey, loud with music and a thousand conversations, like always, so I didn’t understand anyone, like always, but it didn’t matter because blah, blah, like always. More champagne? Cheers.

Young women in ball gowns with their hair up, my god. Young men in suits, tuxedos, hair carefully mussed. Boy. Cute.

There was a disco upstairs too. A band composed of school students or graduates was playing. They weren’t bad, but their selection of songs sucked, most you couldn’t dance to. Then they played something danceable, I forget what, and still, no one was dancing. Stiff Austrian pupils standing around, feh. So one of the nuttier high school teachers started dancing with someone, then Alpha and I made a spectacle of ourselves as well.

Later, in the bar, he thanked us for “supporting him in the disco.” Hell, we were just being asses and having a good time.

The band in the main ballroom, though – their cardinal sin, even worse than lousy choice of songs and having a body-builder singer who wanted to be the guy from Nickleback, was not keeping a steady tempo. They kept speeding up and slowing down.

Really hard to dance to, Dick, I give them just ten points and five bucks towards a metronome.

Anyhow, we had fun. And I’m looking forward to more dance lessons next fall.