When my friends Karl and Melanie got married a few years ago, they entered their reception to a dramatic, choreographed tango staged on a dance floor in front of the picture windows overlooking the pond at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. It was spectacular and totally them.

(As an aside, I caught the bouquet at that wedding. And look -- just five years later, I am getting married! Never let anyone tell you that’s a silly superstition.)

I knew when I said yes to marrying Seth that a dramatic, staged first dance wasn’t in my future. Despite the fact that he’s a natural athlete and a competent musician, Seth is one of these guys who has some kind of mental block against dancing, and I can only get him out on the floor if I put exactly the right amount of alcohol in him (not too much, not too little) and ensure him no one’s looking at him. He hates to be the center of attention. We’ve come a long way from the early months of our relationship (no dancing at all! Ever!) to today, when I can usually weasel him into one or two slow dances if there are a lot of other people out on the floor. Our all-time record for dancing was set at our friends’ Missouri wedding at which Mini Lady Gaga made an appearance. And that was in a dark nightclub. With bottle service. And Mini Lady Gaga. So, you know... all bets were off.

So wedding tangos were out of the question from the start. We picked a mutually agreeable first dance song early in our engagement (and no, I’m not telling you what it is; there have to be some surprises for our guests) and I resigned myself to the probability that we would be swaying, junior-high-style, for three minutes.

Then, a few weeks ago, my dad suggested dance lessons. I don’t remember if my mouth said yes right away, but in my head I was jumping up and down with excitement. Confession: We may or may not have given Seth the impression that the dance lessons would be just for my dad and me. I don’t know; with so much going on, it’s hard to keep up with the details. Who knows what may have been said or not said? I’m honestly a little unclear myself on what happened in between, but I do know that at some point my dad suggested dance lessons, and a few weeks later, we found ourselves at a group lesson at Fred Astaire Dance Studio on 68th Avenue, along with my parents and Seth’s dad and stepmother, learning to foxtrot.

I’m not an expert at wedding planning by any means, but here’s one piece of advice I can give you: Take dance lessons. Seriously. After the group lesson, we signed up for private lessons for Seth and me and for my dad and me. And it is saving my sanity right now.

Here’s the great thing about dance lessons: Nothing happens during them except dancing. During our 50-minute sessions with instructor Cheryl (who is great, by the way, and knows her way around a wedding dance), I’m not thinking about the wedding. I’m not thinking about the makeup artist I almost couldn’t get or the several unexpected plus-ones that have somehow ended up added to our guest list or the fact that last Saturday was supposed to have been our wedding before we rescheduled it due to a conflict with a street fair. You know what I’m thinking about? Staying on count. Staying in my box. Holding my frame. Underarm turns.

It’s amazing. I only wish we had started six months ago.

The frosting on the dance lesson cupcake, of course, is that at the end of it all I’m going to be able to dance with both my husband and my father in a manner that makes us all look reasonably competent. Not fancy, but competent.

Even Seth might not be sorry. I looked over at him during our group lesson last week as we were all practicing our East Coast swing steps in two long lines.

He looked bored.

Cheryl, I might add, had only a few minutes earlier described dance as “a sport-like activity.” I had seen a light bulb go on over Seth’s head in that moment.

“You’re bored,” I said to Seth. He shook his head. “You are. You’re bored. You’ve mastered this step. You want to move on to the intermediate skills.”