"We're small town girls."

Rockin Rodeo – the place to be in Fredericton, the small provincial capital of New Brunswick, Canada, on a Thursday night. Definitely. As the snow flakes are slowly falling through the night sky outside, hell is let loose inside the club. I’ve never been to a place like that – there’s actually people who wear cowboy hats when they go out and dance to Country music! And to a ‘civilised’ European this might sound like Rockin Rodeo’s customers are middle-aged hillbillies… but no: my age! It was great --- I mean, if you were flexible enough. I’m quite flexible, I think, so it only took me a few songs to get the groove of rocky Country music.
Iman (my dear Iranian friend, who I came here to visit) is probably famous in that club, considering he goes there every other week or so to dance from open to close, like a ‘dancing-machine’, as he calls himself. And if he doesn’t already look different enough in between all the blond Canadian girls and boys (“unfortunately I’m not Caucasian” he‘d say) – when he’s on the dance floor, he’s almost a tourist attraction. We’d hardly walked in to the club – I was checking out the clientele, ready to get a drink and sit down for a bit – when he was already on the dance floor.

Fredericton must be quite a conservative town, at least the rules on dancing seemed old-fashioned: I stepped outside at one point later in the evening, just in my t-shirt, to cool down and smoke a strange Canadian version of my beloved clove cigarettes (this one actually had NO tobacco in it!) in the calmly falling snow, when a shivering young man expressed his feelings about the temperature. I tried to cheer him up: “You’ve gotta dance in there, then you won’t be cold out here!” Shrugging his shoulders, he replied. “You gotta find a nice girl to dance with first.”

And if you were shy to dance on your own, that was certainly true: the dance floor was full of small clusters of girls - enjoying the security of the group and occasionally throwing flirtatious glances at the groups of boys standing around the dance floor - and the occasional couple. Now neither Iman nor I were in any way opposed to the idea of dancing on our own. In fact, I often prefer to dance on my own, just because of freedom of movement. [I don’t mind dancing with other people, whether friend or stranger, but I feel uncomfortable dancing with girls who give me the feeling that they expect me to make some sort of phoney move on them while dancing. I usually dance for dancing’s sake, nothing else.]
So we did. Dance on our own, that is - and what an experience it was. We were like dancers in a place that had never seen dancers before... well, that sounds arrogant - people WERE dancing, but only within the boundaries of the commonly accepted ways to dance - a concept we neither knew nor cared much about.

We both really enjoy dancing, but in Iran we had never been able to do that, because of... let's call it 'cultural restrictions', so we'd been looking forward to going dancing together for a long time. So while we were enjoying ourselves, every now and then a girl would break loose from one of the groups of girls on the dance floor that were laughing and chatting while looking at us. She'd come over to one of us dance with us - sometimes throwing girly smiles over her shoulder to her friends, who were intently watching. Then, after an arbitrary period of time, she would suddenly turn around and rejoin the group, which then usually burst into laughter or shouted to applaud their comrade's brave venture into dangerous territory. It seemed as if we had become victims of teenage courage tests, purely for entertainment.

So we obviously drew all the gazes on us, which was both odd and exciting, because it resulted in both a feeling of popularity or at least that of being centre-stage and a feeling of being isolated or being distinctly viewed as an alien to the place. Although that mix of feelings in combination with total anonymity gives you some sort of immunity to do and move as you please, it can also makes you feel a bit lonely, because you are distinctly excluded. But I wasn't in a lonely mood, so I enjoyed the immunity and the gazes instead.

One cute girl - probably in her late teens and a little smaller than me - danced up to me and made it impossible for me to ignore her. But I was quite glad, since the dance floor was packed and it felt kind of weird having to face people's backs when dancing. So we were doing a little back-to-back number and nearly fell over. She apologised that her boob almost popped out and then, just before she walked off again, she said something funny: “You smell of Nachos – did you just eat some?” “No”, I said “but is that a compliment?” “Yeah, I LOVE them.”