How is she good at everything? It’s like she’s a robot or something. A high-achieving robot with a bad grasp of human emotions.

She stands up, spreads her legs apart, and rolls down slowly to touch the floor. As her head hangs between her legs, she catches me staring at her and holds eye contact with me for a few seconds. “What?”

“You look . . . intense,” I blurt out. “Your outfit, I mean.”

“I like to do things right.” She closes her eyes and continues to hang there, bending one knee and then the other.

A stab of irritation hits me. What a condescending response. “Yeah, I totally get that,” I say, giving her a tight smile. “It doesn’t look like you’re trying too hard at all.”

She snorts. “Great. I feel much better now that I have your opinion on my outfit.”

“You’re welcome,” I say as snottily as I can manage.

“Do you have any other brilliant opinions to offer?” She straightens. “Or can I go back to stretching?”

“Carry on.” I turn away and pointedly ignore her.

“Okay, let’s do a quick warm-up before we get started,” Brittany says, bouncing to the front of the crowd. “We’re going to be learning a little bit of the choreography from the block party number, but let’s make sure we’re all nice and warm first. Starting with your feet apart in a nice wide second . . .”

I mirror Brittany as she leads us through a warm-up, feeling pretty good about myself. I’m fairly athletic and in better shape than a lot of the other people here. Once Brittany starts teaching the dance, however, my confidence evaporates.

Not only is the choreography fast, but she teaches it in long sections that are impossible to remember. I can’t recall any dance terminology I learned from middle-school theater either, so I have no idea what she’s talking about half the time. As she starts drilling us on the moves, she yells at us in some nonsense language that’s a mixture of the song lyrics, the dance moves we’re supposed to be doing, and random sounds that go with the movements or the beat of the song.

“Mm, gah kah, shimmy . . . kah kah. Spin yourself around and step ball change. Gabriela, I can—kah kah kah kah.” Brittany eyes us critically. “Let’s go over that last part slowly before adding the magic in. You need to make sure your weight is on your left foot.”

No, what I actually need is to be able to remember the combination. That would probably assist me in executing it.