I'm not exactly sure what sort of dancing you mean, but you mention it twice and I happen to have some background in dancing in a variety of styles. And since you seem to be somewhere in the SF Bay Area, I strongly recommend the social dancing lessons taught by Richard Powers at Stanford and in Palo Alto as a venue to learn/practice both social and dancing skills. I found it to be an extremely welcoming community and low-pressure environment to learn. Friday Night Waltz which occurs in both Palo Alto and East Bay is also a great community.
"Social dance" is similar in content to ballroom dancing, but recreational and more improvisational in approach. Skill will let you dance comfortably and enjoyably with someone you've just met. I think this style of dancing helps a lot with the social ability stuff too, because you learn how to send and interpret body language signals, and you have to interact on a basic social level with lots of people in a short period of time. There's a rather explicit expectation that asking someone to dance is not a romantic overture, which I (and many others) find comforting.
Of course, YMMV on any/all of this.
Am I reading the prices correctly as $45 for the whole course for a non-student?
Edit - please disregard this post
Apologies for the wasted time spent reading and replying to this post. Please disregard it.
I've been feeling non-awesome for a long time. I don't know if anyone else here feels the same way, but I'm going to assume that at least a few people do. I want to correct this horrible deficiency.
We already have the LW meetups in a lot of places, monthly in some places and weekly in others. I've gone to a few, and they're interesting and I get to meet a lot of very smart people (and get intimidated by them)... but mostly all we've done is talk and sometimes go and eat at a restaurant. I want more than this!
We already talk, we need an action-based meetup. I want to propose another kind of meetup, the Insufficiently Awesome meetup. It should aim to make us good at baseline things like fitness, social skills, strategy, and reflexes, and to make us very good at specialized awesome things like master-level chess/go/shogi, public speaking, various sports, dancing, making music, making art.
I think this meetup should be daily, though not everyone would want to go every day. Nonetheless, we should have something happening every day that we're not spending talking. The goal shouldn't be just to be fit in different situations, but to instead become totally awesome.
Is there anyone else that feels the same? If so, what things do you think we need to learn for the baseline, and what things should we get very good at?