[El Salsero Gringo]

Whenever I (as a Taxi-dancer) ran a consolidation class, I made an effort to have some music around - I even brought a CD player along a couple of times before the venue manager provided one.

We used to go through the moves taught in the beginners class, and it meant that I had a chance to look around the room to see that moves were basically coming out correctly, that everyone was turning in the right direction at the right time and so on.

It also meant that the newer dancers had already had some interaction with the Taxi-dancers, hopefully remembered our names, and were therefore more comfortable with asking us to dance later (if we didn't ask them first) or to ask questions that hadn't cropped up in the workshop.

It functioned as an opportunity to talk about lead-and-follow, which I did, even then as a dancer of barely a year's experience, to talk about thumbs and hand-grips and other 'details', and to give a quick pep-talk on how important it is to get out there and actually do it rather than just talk about it. And because I was a relatively new dancer myself I was able to draw on my very recent experience of going through exactly what the new dancers were feeling (or something like it, anyway.)

Remembering back a little further to when I was a beginner I found the whole process very helpful, and I remember with grateful thanks the Taxi-dancers that assisted me along.