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cing. Half with amusement, half with embarassment and half with fright I said yes I'd try. You will notice that that is three halves and that is a fair description of my state of mind at the time. Well, we started and I stumbled all over him because, from force of habit being in the lead all the previous years since I'd first learned, I was trying to lead. Final- ly, it came to me that this would never do, so I told him that I was going to close my eyes so I wouldn't be tempted to lead and would let him take over. As soon as I did we managed to get along very well. It turned out to be quite an experience because for the first time in my life I was giving the decision-making completely to someone else. The decisions were not great, just those that the one with the lead makes in dancing, but large or small I was not making them. I am a pretty self- determining sort of person and so it was a very new experience to hand all the control to someone else. After the novelty of the first few minutes wore off, I found that I enjoyed it immensely. I could relax, let go, just follow someone else's lead and not worry about the results of the decisions he made. It was up to him to avoid collisions or being tripped or whatever. For the first time in my life I was free of decision-making. I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that.

Well, between 1964 and about 1966 when the marriage began to go sour I didn't have any further experiences along this line. But in 1966 I decided to go to dancing school and really learn to dance as a woman. So I registered at a local school and began to go for private lessons during the week and for the open class dance on Fridays. Here I began to learn some of the realities of a woman's life. You can't learn to dance unless you get the opportunity to try. So I found myself in the line with the rest of the women waiting for some man to ask me to dance. Since, at 5'8'', I am taller than lots of women and since men, in maintaining their ego position, like to dance with women shorter than themselves, I found out what it was like to stand, wanting to be asked but having men pass me by and ask another woman two places further on. Of course this didn't happen every time but it happened enough that I found out what it was like to be dependent on a man's whims for my pleasures. Most women are conditioned in this direction since girlhood so it rather seems to them just to be the way life is. But for me it was much more poignant because I had not had my individual sen- sitivity, interest and drive dulled by such indoctrinations. I could feel it clearly. There I was in line with a lot of other socially underprivileged women, awaiting some man's choice knowing that he was checking over my face, my figure, my outfit and my smile as well as my height before making up his mind. That was my first introduction to being a second-class citizen and feeling like a car on a second-hand lot with a

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