In My Apartment I Have Many Misjudged Leather Bound Books

A couple of weeks ago, I was smacked hard in the face with a reminder of a lesson learned back in grade school. And when it happened, it was so startling and so pure that immediately i thought, "I gotta share this story... I'm definitely gonna blog about this." But I forgot about it until it hit me again... So now I have a story to tell you with a theme. The theme is that you should never judge a book by its cover.

So as I have mentioned in previous posts, my brother P.K. is legit when it comes to playing salsa music. So my sister, Showbiz, and I went to watch him play at a club were they have social dancing. This means that everyone stands along the wall and you just go up to someone and ask them to dance. It reminded me a lot of every junior high dance I have ever attended/seen on tv, except people actually were dancing. Anyway, ahead of us in line to get in was an asian man who looked like he came straight from his computer programming job at Google. He had the hair parted on the side, big glasses, and a long sleeve button up shirt with I kid you not, a pocket protector in the pocket, complete with several pens in it. I saw him and immediately pointed him out to Showbiz, and we both shared several minutes worth of jokes and laughing.

When we got in and sat down, they had just finished a song. This is tangental, but for some reason in this place, every time a song ended, everyone would clear the dance floor. Which was fine except for the fact that when the next song started up 30 seconds later, everyone was back out on the dance floor dancing... Made absolutely no sense to me, which I felt compelled to let my sister know for the next hour. Okay so back to the story... I look up and I see computer guy, I will call him Bill from now on, I see Bill standing on the edge of the floor. Then when the music starts up again, Bill walks up to easily the hottest woman in the place and asks her to dance. Now this lady looked the part, and she definitely looked like too much for my boy Bill.

As Bill lead her out to the dance floor, I nudged Showbiz, and said, "Watch this! It's about to be a disaster." But it wasn't. Bill apparently was trained in the arts of salsa dancing from birth, because he had it on lock. My man Bill seriously looked like Fred Astaire on roller skates, he was that graceful. I could not believe my eyes... Everything Bill did looked natural, like he was born knowing how to do it. But the jaw dropping moment, was when Bill, with the most stone faced expression, spun his dance partner around several times, grabbed her leg and pulled her close, and then drug her across the floor. Around this time everybody else just stopped and started watching Bill. He was in the zone! When the song ended, Bill dipped his dance partner, and as he let her go, he looked at me and threw me a head nod as if to say "what's up now?" And for the rest of the night, Bill had no shortage of partners, while I sat there watching.

So that's my story... I admit I had it coming, as Bill served me up a gigantic plate of humble pie. But I wonder how many times I've been misjudged by someone who just looked at the exterior instead of actually getting to know me first. I for one know that I will never make that mistake again... and I owe it all to Bill, the salsa dancing computer programmer.