I shared this on Facebook and people seemed to enjoy it so I thought I’d post it here as well.
My oldest daughter just got married. Here is the video from the father/bride dance. The only thing better than watching my daughters dance is dancing with them.
Go to the YouTube page to watch it or click below.
This song was extra-special to us. Aside from beautifully capturing some of my key parenting strategies (spend lots of time with your kids and don’t be afraid to get into their world, and prepare them to go off with a great guy for life a la Genesis 2), my daughter actually had the role of Cinderella in a ballet when she was a Senior. And in a nepotism-at-its-best manner, I played her father onstage. So this was the perfect song for our dance.
I have to admit that when I first heard this Stephen Curtis Chapman song on the radio I quickly turned it off, thinking it was too sentimental. Then when she was going to play Cinderella my wife encouraged me to listen to it. It has become one of my favorites since then. And we love the Viennese Waltz dance that goes with it.
I danced with Cinderella . . . three minutes of Heaven. Thanks be to Jesus!
Take your roles as husbands and fathers very seriously. You’ll be glad you did.
An RKO publicity still of Astaire and Rogers dancing to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” in Roberta (1935) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
No, not moron ballroom dancing, although that’s what I sometimes feel like when learning new steps.
I wanted to follow up on my original post with some additional thoughts on the hobby we started two years ago to celebrate our 25th anniversary.
We take lessons several times a week (they have group classes nightly from Tuesday through Saturday and we take at least one private lesson per week) and venture out at least a month. Our favorite place is in the Heights where they have big band music and a variety of dances. It is a great deal — only $11 per person and you can bring your own snacks and drinks.
We are taking at a Fred Astaire studioclose to our house. We’ve been really pleased with the instructors. Very thorough and friendly. If you tell them we referred you it is only $25 for a startup package with two private lessons and one group lesson (and they give us a free lesson). It is $50 without a referral.
One tip that could really help you: Once you’ve learned a step, make a video from your camera phone of your instructor showing your partner. Then you can watch the steps and know you are practicing it correctly. There have been many times when I thought I remembered it correctly but ended up practicing the wrong thing, which takes twice as long to un-learn then re-learn.
Also – and I realize this goes in the Captain Obvious category — it makes a huge difference if you practice new figures. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time, just a few minutes on a couple occasions as close to when you learned the steps as possible.
And note that dancing makes you smarter! Seriously, a New England Journal of Medicine discovered that something about the rapid-fire decision making involved in some forms of dancing has a profoundly more significant impact on reducing dementia than other forms of exercise, and even twice as much as reading.
Mary left this fantastic comment on the last post:
I just got back from a ballroom dance party. Love it! It’s good exercise, fun, mentally stimulating, expressive, and it makes me happy.
It also teaches me a lot about the Christian marriage dynamic. In ballroom dancing, as in Christian marriage, the man leads, and the woman follows his lead. They work together as a team, both being equally important and necessary to the dance, but with distinct roles. The man needs to lead gently, but firmly, making his intentions clear and doing his best to bring the best out of his dance partner. The woman follows the man’s leading, being sensitive to what direction he is taking her in and going with the flow of the movement he initiates. Much courtesy and grace is needed from both parties. Both will make mistakes. The key to getting the best out of one’s dance partner is encouragement for what they do right, coupled with diplomatic suggestions for improvement. Without the encouragement, the suggestions for improvement don’t go down as well. If one party gets the dance completely wrong, the other party has to stop them and gently indicate what it should be. Sometimes, there are times when the man gets the timing wrong. The woman can help him with the timing. But at other times it’s best to just keep going with the beat in his head. It feels frustrating sometimes but it works out better than struggling with your dance partner.
I’m single, but the above looks a lot like the Christian marriage dynamic to me.
I’ve used that illustration when teaching passages about Christian marriage, such as Ephesians 5. Anyone who has danced realizes how chaotic it would be if there was no official leader. Yet the notion that you are competing with your partner is foreign to dancing. You are most clearly a team.
“‘He told the producer: “Tell Oprah that yes, I did it. I killed Nicole, but it was in self-defence. She pulled a knife on me and I had to defend myself”,’ the insider was quoted as saying.”
. . .
Is there anyone except the 12 morons who were on the original jury that is surprised by this revelation?
Of course it was self-defense! That’s why he went to his “attacker’s” home wearing gloves and carrying a big knife. He had to defend himself!
One of the more egregious side issues of the OJ case was how groups like NOW, the National Organization of (unaborted) Women, rushed to OJ’s defense. Uh, what about that pesky domestic abuse issue, folks? That so disturbed Tammy Bruce that she quit NOW (I think she was head of the California chapter at the time) and began to oppose them.
Can you believe that anyone takes Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann seriously?
Oops, I meant Obama and Biden.
The problem isn’t Obama, it is media bias. Did you see those clips played endlessly on the news or on SNL? This video should be required viewing to be able to vote. It exposes the viciousness and bias of the Leftist mainstream media. Don’t be suckers. Broaden your media horizons and get informed. Vote based on real experience, what kind of judges candidates would select, etc. Don’t let the media put up strawmen about who is smart and who isn’t.
I just went through The Song of Solomon as part of my “read the Bible in a year” program and couldn’t help but notice that:
1. The love story involved one man and one woman.
2. The man seemed to know he was a man, didn’t question it and had certain manly traits and roles.
3. The women seemed to know that she was a woman, didn’t question it and had certain womanly traits and roles.
4. There wasn’t even a hint in this iconic book on romance of relationships between two men, two women, transgenderism, etc.
5. Despite their obvious passion for each other, the theme of waiting until marriage for sex was repeated at least four times:
Solomon 3:5 I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles or the does of the field,
that you not stir up or awaken love
until it pleases.
How politically incorrect! I wonder how the theological Liberals deal with this work (other than immediately denying that it is God-inspired). After all, they teach that homosexual, bi-sexual, transgender, etc. are preferences assigned by God. It seems odd that He wouldn’t have been more inclusive.
And they also support the Planned Parenthood mantra of waiting to have sex until you are ready, and ignoring what your parents and religion have to say (Shockingly enough, kids tend to decide they are “ready” when they really, really want to have sex. And then lots of disease and unplanned pregnancies happen. Go figure!)
Seriously, it is a great book. Sex is “God’s wedding present,” a truly great thing designed for a life-long relationship between one man and one woman.
This case was destined to be another example of the egregious abuses of academic freedom documented by Ben Stein in Expelled!, but this one turned out a little better. See Journal Apologizes and Pays $10,000 After Censoring Article for a very important post on what is still going on in scientific circles.
These violations are so destructive, because the same bullying / cowardice you see in evolution debates has proved equally successful (read: lucrative) in the Global Warming / Global Climate Change scam.
Some snippets:
In one of their favorite soundbytes, members of the Darwin lobby like to assert that intelligent design scientists do not publish peer-reviewed research. That claim is manifestly false. But the fact that intelligent design scholars do publish peer-reviewed articles is no thanks to Darwinists, many of whom do their best to ensure that peer-reviewed articles by intelligent design scientists never see the light of day.
Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.
The publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters(Elsevier, the international science publisher) has now agreed to issue a public statement apologizing to Dr. Sewell as well as to pay $10,000 in attorney’s fees.
. . .
Lepiscopo points out that in retracting Sewell’s article, Applied Mathematics Letters “effectively accepted the unsubstantiated word and unsupported opinion of an inconsequential blogger, with little or unknown academic background beyond a self-professed public acknowledgment that he was a ‘computer science grad’ and whose only known writings are self-posted blogs about movies, comics, and fantasy computer games.” This blogger’s unsupported opinion “trumped the views of an author who is a well respected mathematician with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Purdue University; a fully-tenured Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas–El Paso; an author of three books on numerical analysis and 40 articles published in respected journals; and a highly sought-after and frequent lecturer world-wide on mathematics and science.”
This is the type of pathetic bullying (on the part of the Darwin crowd) and cowardice (on the part of the journalists) that is rampant in science:
After Dr. Sewell’s article was pulled, Darwinian zealots crowed about their achievement and maliciously speculated that the article was withdrawn because it wasn’t really peer-reviewed or because it was somehow substandard. The journal, meanwhile, left Dr. Sewell to twist in the wind, seemingly endorsing the Darwinists’ smears. The journal editor Dr. Rodin wrote a groveling letter to the Darwinist blogger who complained to him in which he agreed that publishing Sewell’s article would involve “impropriety.” Rodin further apologized “for our erroneous judgement in even considering this paper for publication.”
. . .
By issuing this statement, Applied Mathematics Letters is essentially admitting that it trashed its own professional standards by what it did. According to the journal’s editorial policies, acceptance of an article cannot be rescinded once an author has been notified of its acceptance, and accepted articles are supposed to be withdrawn only “under exceptional circumstances” such as fraud, errors, ethics violations, and the like.
“None of these circumstances even remotely occurred with respect to the withdrawal of Dr. Sewell’s paper,” said Mr. Lepiscopo.
Sadly, the kind of successful bullying by Darwinists that was documented in Expelled! leads to this sort of abuse:
One can sympathize with the editor’s situation. Perhaps he heard about what happened toevolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian after he allowed a peer-reviewed article favorable to intelligent design to be published in the biology journal he edited.
If there is a “war on science” today, it’s not being waged by the critics of Darwinism or supporters of intelligent design. It’s being waged by Darwinian fundamentalists who are attempting to prevent any voices except their own from being heard in the scientific community. They seem willing to do virtually anything to silence their critics–from denying them tenure, to preventing them from being hired, to engaging in cyber attacks, to censoring peer-reviewed articles by scholars with whom they disagree. Italan geneticist Guiseppe Sermonti has remarked that “Darwinism… is the ‘politically correct’ of science.” How right he is.
Dear Darwinists: You are bullies and cowards. You know it. We know it. If you were confident in your views you wouldn’t have to resort / succumb to such behavior.
And the Global Warming / Global Climate Change lobby is no different. Just follow the money.
And be sure to see the Wintery Knight’s sendup of cowards A. C. Grayling and Richard Dawkins, who come up with the lamest of lame excuses to avoid debating William Lane Craig.
My wife and I started taking ballroom dance lessons last month to celebrate our 25th anniversary and have really enjoyed it. It is a great way to spend time together and learn something new. I never liked free form dancing but ballroom is much different. The key for me is just breaking it down and getting lots of repetition.
Do any of you do ballroom dancing? What do you like about it?
We’re about ready to venture out into the public. A friend told us about this place in the Heights that plays some big band music at least one Saturday a month. Any other good places to go in the North Houston area? We thought it would be fun to get some friends to go out together now and then.
We’ve covered a lot of dances – Rumba, Cha cha, Waltz, Foxtrot, Salsa, Swing, Two step, and more. Some are progressing more than others! We were leaving one night and I noted that I really enjoyed the Mamba. My wife pointed out that a mamba is a poisonous African snake and that I probably meant the Rumba. (She was right, though I should have claimed I meant it as a combination of the Samba and the Rumba).
We are taking at a Fred Astaire studioclose to our house. We’ve been really pleased with the instructors. Very thorough and friendly. If you tell them we referred you it is only $25 for a startup package with two private lessons and one group lesson (and they give us a free lesson). The group lessons aren’t very large – we’ve never had more than 5 people in a class. Note: It gets more expensive after the trial: There are packages that average $100 for a private lesson and a week of group lessons (i.e., $400 for 4 private lessons and 4 weeks of unlimited group lessons). But group lessons are only $25 and you can learn a lot in those.
They also have free Saturday night open dancing for students, sort of a ballroom dance party. They play music for all the different dances and are glad to give you tips along the way.
The Houston Repertoire Ballet presentations of the Nutcracker Ballet are December 3 – 5. Tickets are $15-18. It is your best holiday entertainment value. Nice theater, good show and no having to to drive downtown!
Guys, impress your wives/girlfriends and take them to see some fine arts. It is a big hit with kids because it is colorful, fast moving and has many short scenes.
I’ll be playing the role of Dr. Stahlbaum (the opening scene party host) for all the shows. I’m retiring after this year! My youngest daughter is the real performer. She has various lead roles in each show. My wife is helping make the costumes. It is fun having something the whole family is involved in.
If you bring any young kids who want to meet the dancers after the show just let me know and I can arrange that.
My oldest is performing in the Nutcracker at the professional company where she is a trainee. We’re excited to go see that one as well.
Eternity Matters 