Old Dog, New Tricks

I am 27 years old and yesterday I learned how to skateboard.

I've actually learned how to longboard, which is like the equivalent of owning a scooter and saying you know how to ride a crotch rocket, but it's pretty fun and I've enjoyed spending the last two days cruising along the St. Kilda boardwalk in the sun.

This newfound skill is due in large part to my new pal Li (Short for Lideweine or a similar difficult-to-pronounce Dutch name) who just purchased her new board the day before yesterday when we were walking around town together. Li and are became fast friends over sushi, as can often happen, and we've spent the last three-ish days cruising around together, skating and having picnics. We went to the salt baths again too, which was heaven, because the day before we walked around the CBD for about 7 hours. :-O  And then directly after that, I went to a pole dance class. Luckily for my body it was a total joke.

I walked into the Pole Princess St. Kilda location at 6:15, early for class, and was handed a waiver and asked for my $15. I should have known from the two chicks at the front desk being completely absorbed in their iPhones that this experience was going to be a little different from the style I was familiar with back in Victoria. I asked them where the change room was and they vaguely waived me towards a back room on the other side of their lovely studio, mirrors all around, about 9 brass poles and a stage up front with a pole. "Oooh a stage for everyone to do performances!" I thought. Ha.

At 6:35 a super-fit Asian chick sauntered into the room, one of the girls that was texting up front earlier, and asked flat out who had been there before. About half the class raised their hands and she shrugged and plugged in her iPod. We began warm up with sneakers on, her barking out aerobic moves that half the girls knew and the other half, me included, kind of figured out along the way.

We were then instructed to go change, and thankfully I brought a pair of heels just in case as there was no mention of this on the website or on the phone. All the girls in the class donned their high heels, no one in the class danced barefoot. Also weird.

Scary lady comes out to the front and steps onto the stage - ah, now I see how this is going to go. She announces that we will be learning two moves today, three if we're lucky. Uh...... ok. Thanks?

First move we learn is the Lola or some crap - essentially a starfish with a showgirl on the end of it (my apologies for those who have no idea what I'm talking about, it's a backward spinny thing and not that hard). She demos it a couple times, barks out 12 things to remember while executing this 1.5 second move, and then walks around the class picking everyone apart. Now, I'm hip to dancing and can take critique to improve technique, but she was so rude I had to hold myself back from slapping her. First-time girls' faces crumbled as they did their best and the instructor responded with a "yeah.... kind of, just clean it up a bit" and walked on.

Second move, the foxy. This was a fireman spin with a kind of split grip... and God help you if your hands weren't exactly where she told you to put them. Scary.

Third move - ooh bonus! - she didn't even give a name I don't think and basically you reach your hands behind your head, grab the pole and then slip down to do the splits. An excellent move to show people who had never been on a pole before, but she did say "most of you won't get this but I'll show you anyway." Thanks! Some of you may have seen me try to execute this before with mixed results so I didn't mind that it didn't go super smooth, but some poor girls just couldn't even hold themselves up that way and felt all left out.

And then, finally, all of this built up to my favourite thing in the whole world - choreography!!!!!! :-D

As a group we were directed to go through all of these moves to crap music, plus about a dozen others like the body wave and the 180 that I knew and some of the regular girls knew but the teacher didn't actually demonstrate. At all. Now my freestyle spirit likes to dance to my own drum, however, in this scenario this was not acceptable. You land your spin on the wrong side, you get yelled at. Start on a beat other than "1" and you get yelled at. Do that body wave too slow or fast? Voted off the fucking island.  So. so. so so. soooooooooooo stupid.

It's 7:15 and I think, "Ok, time for stretching and the chatty portion, this will be nice." Nope, you just stand there and the instructor tells you about the Pole Princess Ponzi Scheme and how there are 7 levels but most people can expect to repeat them several times. If you take casual pole, as that class was, well my friend you are Shit Outta Luck because she tends to teach the same moves in that all the time, and unless you sign up for Level 1 you're screwed. Then she does a pretty wicked demo of some quite impressive acrobatic moves and tells the girls they can maybe be like this one day if they enroll with Pole Princess and come to class 3 times a week for 3 years.

Now, some of you may know that I don't like it when people tell me to do something an exact way. This is why I quit piano and why I do most of my pole knowledge via youtube - because I do it to feel happy and have fun and I figure if it floats it's a fucking boat. So this class rubbed my the wrong way big time. It amazed me that about half the girls were die-hards who came to casual pole every few weeks and were quite stoked to learn the same moves all the time and probably never really improve.

After the class I was interested to have a chat with the instructor and talk about how the classes I was familiar with in Canada were very freestyle, not so much about the choreography and very into modifying moves for various levels of ability. Didn't really get that chance though as she'd already fled to the front desk to play on her iPhone, without even saying good evening to the class. Un. Real.

So, I was a bit let down with the Pole Princess group and wish them the very best success for a business that treats their clients like dumb dogshit. Good luck!

As they say, where one door closes another opens, and later that night I went down to the beach to check out the sunset with Li and this is where I took a stab at skateboarding for the first time. I ride with my left foot in front, she prefers to have her right foot forward, but amazingly we both cruise along just fine together doing whatever the eff we feel like. And we have fun doing it!