Dancing as self-therapy

0 Comments | USA TODAY, July, 2008 | by Craig Wilson

Quick, Before the Music Stops: How Ballroom Dancing Saved My Life

By Janet Carlson

Broadway, 272 pp. $19.95

Fed up with your life? Is your marriage a sham? Do you feel empty inside? Well, then, maybe you should go dancing. It worked for Janet Carlson.

Carlson, the beauty and health director at Town & Country magazine, has written a book whose story line might seem too good to be true. But let's not be a downer here.

After competing in the world of ballroom dancing in her 20s, Carlson eventually found herself in an empty marriage, wandering through her days without much to be happy about except her two young daughters. Then her husband gave her, of all things, 20 dancing lessons for Valentine's Day. Maybe in hope it would...