I am not a good dancer.

This is not my “mortifying disclosure” however it would have been a helpful revelation to make to Joe Walsh’s  back up dancers when they asked me if I wanted to come on stage during the show. But they were cute, and I was young and eager to please, so instead of explaining that this was a horrible idea, I agreeably went along.

It was the late 1980s in Chicago. I was a cocktail waitress at Park West, a cool little concert venue on the near North side, where every seat has a great view of the stage, and drinks are brought right to your table.

It was my night off, and my friend Karen and I came to see the show – Joe Walsh, sans The Eagles, playing a set of his old time favorites. Because we were too cool to merely sit and watch, Karen and I were hanging out in the service bar which was in the hallway where the performers came and went from the stage to their dressing rooms.

Midway through the show two strikingly handsome dancers sidled up to the bar. They had Australian accents and blond hair, with tight pants and open shirts exposing a plane of washboard abs. It sounds cheesy now, but at the time they were breathtaking.

Full disclosure: the dancers initially asked Holly, one of the other cocktail waitresses, to dance on stage with them, but being a clever girl, she declined. “I’m working,” she said. “But she’s free.” She nodded her head in my direction, and my heart went all aflutter. I immediately pictured Courtney Cox dancing adorably on stage with Bruce Springsteen, and felt certain this would be my catapult to stardom – Courtney landed a role on Family Ties right after that concert, surely I would be equally famous.

Alas, my on stage dancing experience turned out to be less than adorable.

When the lovely muscley dancer asked if I was game, I nodded eagerly (foolishly). He took my hand and I grabbed Karen’s hand, and with the other dancer following behind we all trotted gleefully toward the stage.

That’s when it occurred to me. I really can’t dance.

Sure, if pressed and with a few drinks in me, I can shimmy around a dance floor by myself, and if I can manage to remember not to wave my hands in the air like I just don’t care, I don’t look like a total ass. But dancing on stage, with dancers, behind Joe Walsh, is quite a different story.

The dancers pulled us both on stage and immediately attempted to dance with us, which was where the trouble began. I have never mastered partner dancing. Even a slow two-step with my father causes me to stumble and apologize.

When this man tried to spin me, I turned awkwardly in the wrong direction, lost his grip and promptly froze when I recognized this moment for what it was – a very public catastrophe.

I am (sheepishly) happy to say, my friend Karen looked just as awkward and miserable as I did. We gamely stayed on stage and tried to follow their cues, but it never  got better. At one point, my dancing partner grabbed me about the waist and picked me up, setting me three feet off the ground on a speaker on stage. I realize now that I was meant to dance in place on the box. But at the time I miseread his cues, and instead attempted to leap back into his arms in a sort of swooning dip -- in my head this seemed like a great way to recover.

I ended up lurching half onto his shoulders, causing him to stumble backward, and catch me in a full frontal hug. That’s when he gave up in disgust.

He took my hand, led me off stage and without saying a word left me standing in the dark of the hallway between the stage and bar. Karen was shunted off a moment later.

“Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as we thought,” we told each other as we recovered in the ladies room. But when a group of women came through the door, saw us and turned around laughing, we knew, if anything it was probably worse.

The next day at work, an intern came up to Karen at her office and asked, “Were you on stage at the Joe Walsh concert last night?”

Karen nodded hopefully, thinking the young girl was at least impressed that she had managed to get on stage. She wasn’t.

Instead, she cringed, and said: “Don’t worry, there really weren’t that many people there.”

And that was the end of my career as a Joe Walsh dancer.