The Inspiration

At just over six feet tall and weighing in, dripping wet, at a skinny 145 pounds, I was a scrawny, spindly teenager. My kid sister said I wore only bow ties because if I wore a long one, it would cover me completely. I was too nearsighted to see a ball clearly enough to catch it, or kick it, so I failed miserably at softball and soccer. And although at my height I should have been good at basketball, I was shamefully uncoordinated. The one time tried out for the basketball team (at my father's strident insistence), I stumbled on a lay-up drill and skidded down the floor on my chin, leaving a wake of blood behind me. Not pretty. The scar is the same as one for a neck lift, which I could certainly use but haven't had. My gawkiness also made me shy and socially inept and I retreated into my academic work where, by dint of intelligence and hard work, I excelled. Latin was much more my subject than Industrial Arts. So I gave up any hope of every being elected by my classmates to Safety Patrol - I secretly coveted the white belts and silver badges they wore as they smartly directed traffic down the halls of Caroline High School - and focused on my aptitude for polishing that good old scholastic apple. But then, like the saving sherrif riding into Dodge City, an itinerant ballroom dance teacher came to town and changed my life forever. In a fifteen-year-old, subconscious prescience of potential popularity, I begged my parents to let me join her classes. Musical genes inherited from my mother dropped me into the rhythmic grooves of fox trot and rumba without effort and the spatial relationships of foot patterns were just like so much geometry to me. I learned quickly. And quickly became popular. Especially with the girls. When college came, I even landed a job giving dancing lessons of my own, teaching over-priviledged, suburban Philadelphia kids the social graces as well as the waltz, cha cha and tango in classes their parents, called The Swarthmore Junior Assemblies. The money I earned paid for my first, eight-week trip to Europe in 1955 on an all-inclusive student tour that cost about $700.00. Incredibly inexpensive as that now seems, I was so poor that by the end of the trip, on an extension in Paris, I survived on cheese and bread. How La Boheme! And what a long time ago.
That first taste of ocean liners and foreign tongues stimulated my appetite for travel and since then, I've feasted on many exotic places in the world. Now retired from a high-powered management career and free of responsibilities to my shrinking family, my love of wanderlust and dancing suddenly came together. In the description of a cruise I was thinking of taking, an asterisk in its details blinked at me like a flashing neon sign: "This cruise will include gentlemen hosts." Somehow I immediately knew (without knowing) that gentlemen hosts were men who traveled free in exchange for entertaining ladies traveling alone. No, not in their staterooms - that was strictly forbidden - but as a good partner at Bridge, shuffleboard, dinner and dancing. Especially dancing. Why, I can do that, I thought. I can most certainly do that. I went online to investigate.