Zumba Epiphany

Last updated on: August 16, 2022 at 7:44 pm by Jennifer Woodruff Tait

Zumba Epiphany 2022-08-16T19:44:00-05:00 Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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Close to 14 years ago, I started going to Zumba classes when we lived in Indiana. After checking a bunch of DVDs out of the library (remember when we all used to do that?) I went first to live classes in the nearby “big city,” and thus got the full-on Latin dance rhythm experience. But then someone started a Zumba class in our small town, and I started going to that to save myself a 35-minute drive.

I am here to tell you that Zumba in the big city may be multi-cultural, but Zumba in a small Midwestern town is hip-hop and rockabilly country and a lot of middle-class middle-aged white ladies doing some aerobics and booty-shakin’ (I hope I can say “booty” here) to “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.” (I am not making this up.) On my Facebook page in March 2009 I commented that “scholars of American culture should not attend Zumba in small midwestern towns, because pondering the ironies gets in the way of learning the steps.” And in 2011, after an experience with the rap remake of “Day-Oh,” I “pondered how a song longing for release from oppression turned into a song celebrating conspicuous consumption” and added that “I suppose this is why students of American culture should not do Zumba, although usually what I ponder is conflicting American views of immigration instead.”

Nevertheless, I kept faith with steps and ironies until I had my second kid, about ten years ago. I actually have a Zumbathon shirt from an event I attended when I was about eight weeks pregnant, which, since I suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum followed by a C-section, was about the last piece of physical activity I did until the baby was about two.

That was the end of my Zumba story until two weeks ago, when I saw on our local Parks and Recreation Facebook page that they were having a free Aqua Zumba class on Thursday nights. Thus it was that I found myself in a large pool full of many small-town people four days ago.

There were women of all ages and sizes and – not a small thing in the formerly segregated South which systematically kept Blacks out of public pools – races. There were even some holiness ladies with hair buns and knee-length bathing suits. As the music was largely hip-hop, I wonder how they reacted to being told to shake their booty and show off their bikini body, but I was too busy trying not to fall over in the water to check. There was exactly one song in Spanish. They even played “Day-Oh” (although it was the original.)

And yet.

The opening song – I kid you not – was “It’s Raining Men” – the famous one-hit wonder by a group called, appropriately enough, the Weather Girls. The group struggled to repeat the success of the song and ultimately disbanded. The video for the song puts the low in low-budget. My inner “good feminist” has struggled with my inner 80s rocker for years over it. And yet – it is one of the most joyful things ever recorded and/or put on screen.

It’s also a ton of fun to jump up and down to in the water. As we got to the chorus, the instructor indicated that we should all jump as high as we could in the air and then come back down on the word “Hallelujah.” So I did. And as I hit the water, in my very modest 50-year-old-lady bathing suit with a little skirt (google “one-piece swim dress”), the skirt spread out flat against the water and I was suddenly seven years old again – long before Zumba, babies, ironies, or anything else.

You see, I used to have a repeated dream when I was a kid. In the dream I was in a swimming pool wearing a tutu that spread out atop the water, repeatedly jumping for joy and never bothered about being wet. What does this dream mean? I have no idea. But I can tell you that for 30 blissful seconds in the middle of a domesticated Zumba class, 43 years after I had the dream, I was enacting it.

Last Sunday I preached about the Good Samaritan. I said most of the things you would expect a preacher to say (I believe the purpose of sermons is to get the Word of God into the people, not to invent new and exciting theology), and one of those things is that you never know when and where you are going to encounter the grace of God. Sometimes, on an otherwise ordinary afternoon in an otherwise ordinary space, in a moment decades in the making and gone before you know it, every last thing makes sense.

Hallelujah.

Photo by AllGo – An App For Plus Size People on Unsplash (P.S. AllGo has amazing photos – check them out.)

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