I was more scared here than I was in a locked church in the backwoods of Appalachia where a Jesus peddler tried to sell every tape, CD, and book he carried around in his profile-spray-painted tour bus.
- Upon entering you are "greeted" with the most superficial, enthusiastic yells of "Hi", "Yay", and "Welcome" by every member of their staff (it was obvious within minutes that the staff were creating a very strained social self)
- All of the staff are trained/forced (I am guessing) to maintain a superhuman level of positivity and energy that comes across as artificial and hollow (every sentence, spoken or written, ends with three exclamation points).
- A 60 minute private lesson is really 40 minutes of dancing and 20 minutes of an extremely hard sell (multiple salespeople).
- The 40 minutes of dancing costs $50-$80 (or perhaps more). As reviewers of other Arthur Murray chains have said, dancing can be learned for 1/3 the cost (community centers, private teachers on craigslist, etc) or free (youtube, etc) in a much more relaxed and enjoyable environment.
- The merengue lesson that was part of the Friday night dance party taught me how to move forward and to the left. Then the party started. No right turns or reverse? The instructor also built in sexy little dance features to the sequence (girls tossing their hair, guys pulling out pistols and shooting the women, etc) and then, like many dance places, had us switch partners. So even though I'm married, the instructor, with the trademarked Arthur Murray fake enthusiasm, constantly urged us/me to be sexy and wild, so by the end of the lesson I ended up firing my sexy love pistols at 4-5 different women while my wife was sexily tossing her hair at 4-5 different men. Switching partners by itself is bad enough, but to switch partners and add all this cheap, sexy trash was about an 11/10 on the awkard-uncomfortable-hating-life scale.
- The scariest part of the night was when the staff stopped the Friday party music to introduce certain paying clients and then dance with them to showcase what clients have learned. One of the women rolled her ankle severely at the end of her showcase dance and was in immense pain. All of us watching were very concerned. As if it was rehearsed, the staff, within 30 seconds of her injury, shooed us away from her ("Give her room!"), turned off the lights, blasted some cha-cha music, and gave us a "free" impromptu cha-cha lesson. The instructor was extra enthusiastic and vigilant of our eyes that were wandering back to the injured woman. He would yell "cha-cha cha-cha-cha" louder and louder until he had forced our obedience and successfully created a cha-cha dance prison.
- Whenever we sat down to rest or talk about how disturbing the experience was, within 20 seconds staff members would come over and tell us to keep dancing or personally take us back to the dance floor.
- We just left the building without saying a word when we sensed a good moment to escape. Alas, the moment was not good enough, as one of the staff members actually came out of the studio and yelled "Leaving so soon? You're coming back, right?" I was afraid of being molested all the way to our car.
Just as the backwoods religious peddlers prey upon the ignorant and fearful and destitute, Arthur Murray seems to not only prey up on the lonely, who are looking for a more fulfilling social existence, but to do so with the most in-your-face, cult-psychology techniques of group and individual control and manipulation. read more
