It all started in college when a friend said, "Hey, you should take a dance class. It's mostly guys and you wear athletics clothes, it's just like coed soccer." That's how I found myself in a leotard, surrounded by women who've been in ballet since they were four, wishing I were dead. I was awful. Really awful. But for some reason I signed up again the next semester, and the next, eventually working through 11 semesters of Jazz, Ballet, Tap, Hip Hop and Choreography.

But it wasn't until seeing the movie Swingers in 1997 that I discovered swing dancing. I took my first East Coast Swing lesson at the Mercury Café in Denver and danced every night I could for the next three months. Summer break ended and, back in school in Oklahoma, I drove four hours round trip for a 2 hour dance in Texas every Friday night. Running out of gas money, I started a dance instruction group called the SwingCats, and soon learned my first Lindy Hop step at a dance workshop in Austin.

After that, it was all over. I've danced in more than 30 cities, been to 14 Lindy Exchanges, and logged more than 500 hours of class instruction with pretty much all of the world's best teachers. I've taught somewhere around 600 classes and taught in 9 different cities. I performed with Neoswing at the 2000 Olympic Games in Australia. I placed 1st in the Jack and Jack division and Top Ten in the Jack and Jill at the 2001 American Lindy Hop Championships.

So I've been pretty much everywhere and done pretty much everything, and I've found that Colorado Springs has been my favorite place of all. The dance instruction group here is as fine as any I've encountered, and better than most. And the dance scene, while small, has a nice, warm community feel. As a member of Focus, my goal is to try to make learning the dance as easy as possible and to constantly bring new influences and new ideas to my students. My dancing is best characterized as exploratory, as in, "it's completely different every nine months".

When I'm not dancing, working, doing homework or attending class, I'm usually at home, hanging out with Laura, watching Laura's new favorite dance clip, and most likely getting talked into practicing some dance step I hadn't done in four or five years. Our cat has learned to call for help.