I'm pretty uncoordinated, and I found that I learned a lot in one well-executed blues dance lesson. According to the teacher, "going limp" is an acceptable strategy for a follow out of eir depth. If you're female (or willing to issue a short explanation to prospective dance partners), you could pick up a few ballroom dances for different numbered beats with a couple lessons per, as a follow, and then let partners pick what's going to happen.

A few questions:

• Do you do any other activities requiring physical coordination, such as martial arts, sports, juggling, yoga, etc.?

• What kinds of music do you enjoy listening to? Do any make you tap your feet or fingers?

• You say you're non-musical. Can you readily identify the beat in a piece of music? Can you tell if a note is higher or lower than the previous one?

• Do you find you learn better from directed instruction, or personal experimentation?

I want to be able to dance at weddings and parties, but I don't know how to break this down into a sequence of learnable subskills. To pick just one step that's not obvious to non-musical me: how do I tell what kind of dance fits the music that is playing? Do any of you have advice on how to quickly achieve a minimum viable level of competence?