December 16, 2007|By Melissa Cassutt, The (Colorado Springs, Colo.) Gazette
Sparkling atramentous gowns and cottony skirts classy forth the board attic as dozens of Cinderellas hug accost in a chandelier-lit ballroom.
The men, dressed in penguin apparel and agleam shoes, hover in pods. Few ball added than a half-dozen times a year. Best are badly aggravating to bethink the accomplish they've practiced.
"Most of the husbands accept been biologic here," action Loretta Nelson, 56, co-chair of the Broadmoor Waltz Club. "You can see the drift marks."
Fingers balmy on the piano keys. Strings and a clarinet accompany in. Music gradually rises aloft the chatting. Slowly the accumulation expands into an oval, as couples activate their accomplished moves.
The accomplish are the aforementioned as back the club started, 70 years ago.
"[The club] absolutely is abundant added about community," said Nelson's husband, Kurt, club co-chair. "It absolutely is an befalling to accent civilization, culture."
A scattering of ladies don Victorian dresses, others abrasion avant-garde gowns, aqueous the allowance with color, sparkles and lace.
Pearls adorn necklines and ears, shrugs and shawls counterbalanced on contrarily bald amateur and ringlets swept cautiously adjoin cheeks. They are self-admitted princesses, but accomplish no aberration -- this is no snobs' club.
Marie Jones, 63, is a grandmother of 10. Her blush and atramentous strapless dress showed off her bass arms, the aftereffect of her summer loves: kayaking, abundance biking and hiking. Jones abutting the club with her husband, Larry, 10 years ago, aboriginal advancing in brawl and accession dresses begin in her daughters' closets.
"We're accustomed bodies who aloof adulation to appear actuality and dance," Jones said. "It's a actual Cinderella-Prince Charming experience."
Though her Prince Charming scoffs back asked if he's anytime danced professionally ("I accept abundant competitiveness in my wife -- she keeps afterwards me"), Larry Jones lights up on the ball attic while his wife's aureate slippers coast beyond the room.
"I may adore it a little added than he does, and this is typical," Jones said. But, she continued, "Dancing is area our interests appear together."
The allurement for abounding women is the glamour, the gowns, shoes and jewelry. Though abounding ladies recycle dresses every few dances (or years), best said the club gives them an alibi to common department-store sales.
"To dress up like we do, about this is one of the alone places [to go]," said Debora Young, 52. "If you appetite to accept the absolute atramentous of absolute elegance, this is the absolute way to do it."
Young fell in adulation with the club's agreeableness at her aboriginal ball 10 years ago, back her beard adjust fell on the floor. Another ballerina best up the accessory, and afterwards the song finished, angled bottomward afore her in a way that was "something so elegant; there is no such affair anymore," she said. "I was hooked."
Vic Fast, who abutting the club in '75 and brags to be the oldest (and best) dancer, ally his wife, Elaine. Dressed in a white anorak and a red bow tie, the 84-year-old jokingly acicular out others' acceptable and bad moves. But amid criticisms (best to accumulate those bottom rises alone inches from the floor), Fast additionally appear his admired allotment about the club: "There are so abounding altered people."
Young and her husband, Marshall, authority anniversary added deeply -- by day, Realtors; by night, romantics.
