Dancing Through Life

When I was ten years old, I met my first girlfriend in a square dancing class at Steven Millard Elementary school in Fremont. She broke my heart the next year, but the year after that I fell in love with mathematics, and it saw me through many otherwise dark years to follow. (It got better)

I entered my freshman year at USC, 1976, majoring in Math — and figured that is what my life would be about. Or so I thought…

Someone (Steve Uretsky) in the dorms dragged me to an audition for the USC Ballroom Dance Team, led by Carol Montez-Bressan. I failed the audition, but tried again later that semester and got in. At first it involved just taking some technique class, but then there were the competitions, routines, Bronze medal exams, watching those lines (!), choreography, and all the styles, foxtrot, quickstep, rhumba, waltz, Peabody, Samba… by Senior year I had to find a little time between choreography and technique to squeeze in some math.

When I started grad school at MIT, I figured it was time to buckle down and get serious about my math.

But there was of course an MIT Ballroom dance club, and a small 4-couple team had formed, wanting to do a Rhumba/Tango to the song Caminita. The colorful Ron Gursky was our coach (he now runs the Rugcutter’s Dance Studio in Boston). We performed it once at a local ballroom in Boston, not too long before my thesis defense in 1984. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I spent a quarter out
at UC Berkeley hashing out my thesis, and got to hang out with member of the UC Berkeley Dance group, just long enough to put together a little rhumba routine there, to the tune of Englebert Humperdinck’s “From Here to Eternity”, which we performed at the Bear’s Ball in Berkeley. My mom
came up from Fremont to see our performance, and it made her cry (awww).

I did my postdoc at UCLA in 1985 and taught math there, but decided academics was not for me and In 1987 I started work at Nasa/JPL doing ground data processing. But they had a small group called the JPL Dance Club, and some of us put together a Salsa Routine, which we performed in front of the building where Carl Saga etc would hang out during the Voyager II encounters.

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I left JPL in 1995 to work at a software company in West LA, and in the evenings would go to an argentine Tango club called Pasión in Studio city, frequented by a teacher named Felix Chavez, whom I first met at USC where he taught our dance team Valentino tango. I took lessons from him for a while and would bring people to the club from work. Felix was a good teacher.

When my wife and I moved to Utah in 2010 we did not know many people here, but over the years we made friends, one of whom was in a flamenco group. I interviewed the group’s leader for a magazine, and for a brief time also took flamenco from her, and even joined her group (formerly all wome) to put on a christmas show.

In the small Utahn town where we now live there were some deep divisions over various political views. There was one man in particular with whom I had many differing views, and we generally did not swim in the same social circles. But one day, this man approached me and said he had heard I knew a bit about ballroom dance. He said that he had a daughter who was in a school for Special Needs kids, and the kids were throwing a christmas party, but did not know how to dance. He asked if I and my wife would come to their party and give a give lessons to the kids on Swing dancing before the music started.

We did. (Photo)

After prompting from some friends here in Utah, I started volunteering as the Literary Chair for the Zion Canyon Arts and Humanities Council (zarts). In the course of that position I conducted an interview with a number of local citizens, include Pamella Asquith, who practiced Flamenco Dance, and had a dance group “Las Palomas” which performed here in Utah. Somehow I got pulled into joining her group as the token male, and wound up buying a pair of Flamenco Boots, attending practices, and performing at a local cultural festival, in full flamenco gear, hats etc.

It has now been 50 years since I first failed that charleston audition for the Carol’s dance team. I have continued to work in high tech / programming in four different companies, and just today (30 September, 2026) am looking at my very last day of work in legal tech. And though through the years my mathematics and science training has deeply satisfied my mind and opened many doors, I have to say that starting with Carol’s dance team and the many things and people and places to which that experience has led me, has enriched my heart and soul, and connected me through the arts to other people, building bridges in ways that I cannot now measure. And for that I am forever grateful.

So, no matter was else you do in life, as Zorba would say, always dance!