I really did not want to go to Dance Church. I’d first heard about the twice-weekly dance class at Velocity Dance Center from a friend who goes to Burning Man, and while I adore this friend, we just aren’t into the same things. She believes in moon ceremonies and astrology; I believe in science and eating gluten. So when she told me about how incredible Dance Church was, how it had literally changed her life, my first thought was that it sounded terrible. Dance plus church? Two nightmares for the price of one. Besides, I’d walked by Velocity after Dance Church before—I’d seen the teeming packs of hard-bodied millennials on their way out. They looked like the sort of people who drink cold-pressed juice and exercise for fun. My beverage of choice is milkshakes and my daily workout is a walk to the kitchen. I doubted I would survive a 90-minute high-intensity dance class/cult, and I did not intend to find out.
A year later, my girlfriend decided it was time to increase our life spans for some unknown reason, and she gently suggested that Dance Church was how we were going to do it. It still sounded awful, but she said it was either that or CrossFit. I agreed to go. Once.
