Ok confession time: how many of you out there took up dancing or were tempted to learn to mambo after watching Dirty Dancing?

I was so damn tickled upon learning that my female instructor did the exact same thing and dragged her best friend to boot! Looking at her, you wouldn't think that she would be the type of person who took up salsa dancing on a whim. Interestingly, enough, the woman later went on to win a solo competition and is now one of the top female salsa instructors in Singapore. Incidentally, the woman also met her husband on the dance floor - some of us are just that lucky.

I am blaming this solely on the late, great Patrick Swayze, who probably conned at least two generations of women (and me) to start learning the mambo and probably also pick up pottery. WTH. Which other dance movie had a dance instructor who was that hot and looked like he thoroughly enjoyed dancing? He had the body, the moves and everyone got jelly legs when he uttered "nobody puts baby in the corner." He can come drag me to the dance floor anytime!

Everybody wanted to learn from an instructor like that and the boys probably thought that he was gay, but what do they know? The only other movie that came close to starting this sort of madness again was that damn hot Argentine Tango scene in Take the Lead with Antonio Banderas.

So after the excitement of the movie, I eventually went to sign up for my first salsa class (which my own cousin promises to be great) and then out walks the instructor who looks like....Ali G. Devastation. He even talks a little like Ali G. -_-" but then, I grew to like salsa and then a couple of weeks, then months, than years later, here I am. Still a nutcase looking for my Swayze nonetheless, at least a much better dancer now. To be honest, Swayze wasn't my only pull factor, there was also some random salsa instructor who popped by the Capitol Gramaphone outlet where I was working at one point and decided to show me how to dance while demo-ing a couple of salsa CDs.  Talk about getting inspired ;)

Ladies, let me be totally straight: the chances of you finding someone that remotely resembles the Swayze is nil to zero. Granted there are a few delectable, hip shaking fellas out there but those guys are few and far between.

My advice? Pick up dancing because you want to, because it is fun and no, one, NO ONE should ever pigeon-hole you can tell you what you should or should not do. And that is my two-cents for this week.