Rick Archer's Note: 

Magic Carpet Ride, Year of Living Dangerously, and Mystery of the Texas Twostep are memoirs that cover the first ten years of my 50 year career as a dance instructor. 

I have written these books with two goals in mind.  First, I want to explain how a young man with limited social skills, minimal confidence, and mediocre dance ability was able to overcome long odds to achieve surprising success in the World of Social Dance.  If you enjoy a good rags to riches story, you have come to the right place.

Second, I have written these books to explain how I acquired my unshakeable belief in Fate.  Over the course of my lifetime, I have been the beneficiary of well over 100 unusual experiences.  While there is no way to make an ironclad case for the existence of Fate, my collection of 'Suspected Supernatural Events' includes several experiences that flat-out defy explanation given our existing scientific view of Reality. 

Given my limitations, it took a series of lucky breaks, 'Supernatural' in their magnitude, to help overcome what seemed like insurmountable obstacles at the time.  Well aware that my lucky streak was largely responsible for my surprising success, I suspected a Divine power was responsible.  I never said a word to anyone about my suspicions at the time, but I often wondered what people would think.  Was I right or wrong?  One day I decided to find out.  By sharing my tale, my Readers could decide for themselves if my unusual experiences justified a belief in Fate. 

Considering Mystery of the Texas Twostep is the third book of a trilogy, new Readers will benefit from a brief background.  In 1974 I was dismissed from graduate school.  Hoping to find a way to contribute to a better world, it had been my dream to become a therapist.  Unfortunately, my Psychology professors thought otherwise.  They considered me ill-suited for a profession which required empathy and listening skills, of which I had little at the time.  I was sent packing at the end of my first year.

Returning to my hometown of Houston, I hit Rock Bottom.  Failure in love, failure in career, I was depressed to the point of becoming a listless zombie.  After a month of feeling sorry for myself, I recovered barely enough to get a job as a social worker.  I investigated reports of child neglect and abuse.  Have you heard the term 'walking wounded'?  Considering my shattered frame of mind, I was at best slightly more functional than the struggling people I checked on.  I had no desire to continue this depressing job for any length of time, so what should I do about finding a career?  Unfortunately, each of the alternative professions I had in mind would require further education.  Still bitter over my dismissal, I was not emotionally prepared to go back to school just yet.  So I decided to work on my other major problem, 'loneliness'. 

Why was I lonely?  Because I was too fearful of rejection to approach any woman I was attracted to.  Crippled by my unfortunate graduate school experience, my fear became so strong it bordered on mental illness.  For several weeks I was unable to leave my apartment at night and go looking.  Locked in paralysis, I had to find some way to break out of this trap.  One night I visited a bookstore in hope of inspiration.  To my surprise, one book had a useful suggestion.  It said the fastest polite way to get a girl in my arms was ask her to dance.  Given the degree of my desperation, I locked onto that idea with the fervor of a drowning man. 

Only one problem.  Thanks to several humiliating dance experiences in high school and college, I already knew learning to dance would be an uphill struggle.  But I never expected it would take three and a half years.  Why so long?  I had several handicaps.  Overwhelmingly analytical, I refused to let my feet move without thinking first.  In addition, I was very inhibited.  I worried that a pretty girl would laugh in scorn if she saw how pathetic my dancing was.  Unwilling to go to a club and practice, I languished in mediocrity.  Did I ever suspect I would be a dance teacher someday?  Of course not.  Treating my lessons as a hobby, I just wanted to get good enough to use dance as a way to meet girls.  Sad to say, the dancing did not cure my lack of confidence.

Despite my continued bad luck with women, something special happened.  Although my learning pace was painfully slow, even a turtle can get somewhere if you give him enough time.  The moment I became a reasonably good dancer, in 1977 three part-time jobs as a Disco line dance teacher were handed to me out of thin air. 

Then came the big break, Saturday Night Fever, January 1978.  The movie took the entire Dance World by surprise.  Totally by accident, I was the only person in Houston to offer a group Disco class on Day One.  This is what I mean when I refer to my 'Supernatural' lucky breaks.  Scrambling like crazy to keep the advantage given by my head start, in essence I learned on the job.  There's an old saying, "the Harder I work, the Luckier I get."  That definitely held true during the Disco Era.  Sometimes my good luck rescued me from a jam.  Other times my good luck involved mentors who appeared from nowhere to help me take my dance program to dizzy new heights. 

I ended my book titled Magic Carpet Ride six months into 1978.  Picking up where MCR left off, The Year of Living Dangerously described how my tattered love life helped me become the best known Disco instructor in the city.  Unfortunately a serious threat to my career emerged in 1979.  So now we get to the Mystery of the Texas Twostep. 

Over a six month period every Disco in Houston closed for a month, then reopened with a Country-Western theme.  I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I was appalled by the implications.  Without a place to dance, what incentive was there for a student to take Disco lessons.  Here is what was strange about this Disco-to-Western transformation.  Western dancing was almost non-existent in Houston prior to 1979.  As well it should be, I thought.  Country dancing belonged in the country, not the city.

So why all this sudden interest?  It turned out the Disco club owners had advance knowledge that Urban Cowboy was soon to begin filming in Houston.  Well aware of what John Travolta had done for Disco, these club owners assumed he would do the same thing for country-western dancing.  Rather than wait for the movie to be completed, the club owners jumped on the Western bandwagon a full year before the movie's scheduled debut in 1980.  Their decision spelled doom for my career as a Disco instructor.  All summer long my Disco classes got smaller and smaller.  By the end of August 1979, the dwindling enrollment indicated the end was near. 

Considering I had no interest in teaching Country-Western dancing, I assumed maybe I would get a job in computers or maybe go back to school and get a teaching degree.  However, during the Labor Day Weekend, two mysterious events took place.  In a flash, the direction of my life pivoted in a completely new direction.