I have always been a male with three left feet, and I avoided the dance floor because of the shame of my ineptness. The way that I was introduced to dancing was when I was on sabbatical at the University of Iowa . My mentor there, Bruce Phofl, was pressured by his wife to take a community dance class so Linda and I went along as moral support. In eight weeks, we learned how to dance a box.
When we returned to UF, in preparation for our son's wedding, we took additional lessons. Through this process, we met our first real teacher, Bob Rogers, who was both an excellent instructor as well as a good marital therapist. Bob was relatively unique as a male teacher in that he could dance both leader (male) and the follower (female) parts equally well. We became hooked on dancing as our adjustment to the empty nest syndrome and to being in the sandwich generation.
After we moved to Auburn, we had trouble finding an instructor locally. So we tried the Dance City Ballroom in Atlanta based on an advertisement that Linda found. We started working with Winston Hunt who introduced to the formal structure of American smooth and rhythm dancing. Then we worked with Julie Reid who taught us about international standard and introduced us to competitions. Since then, we have worked with Steve Hadley in Birmingham , Jari Muller and Hannah Cole in Atlanta , and Olga Bogdonov in south Florida .