They say you should never put furniture polish on a wood floor. But clearly, They don’t dance Argentine tango. I do, and until recently, I had a serious dance issue. I live in a city where the Argentine tango community is divided and caustic. Disagreements about dance styles and music preferences errupt regularly causing dance venues to close and instructors to stop teaching. During those tantrum-tossed intervals when there’s nowhere to go dance, my partner and I dance on a hardwood floor in the living room.

The floor looks like it would be a good dance floor, but it has some kind of water-based finish that’s stiff, slow, and hard to pivot on. We’ve been going to refinish the floor, not for any cosmetic reason, but to make it a better dance floor. Naturally, we’ve haven’t gotten around to it. So the other night we decided to go against everything we’ve ever been told about putting furniture polish on the floor. We applied it very lightly and let it dry. It was slick all right, and it coated the suede dance soles on our shoes, too. But we took little steps and kept wiping our feet on a damp towel, and after an hour or so, parts of the floor were becoming very manageable.

It isn’t the safest thing to do to a wood floor, but it turned our living room into a pretty dance-able venue. Dancing was much easier on our feet, and it was also much quieter. I had always assumed that our feet were so noisy when we danced in the living room (compared to real dance halls) because the house is old, the living room is on the upstairs level, and there was no one else dancing around us to mask the sound of our feet. But after we applied the furniture polish, it was like any other dance floor. The thing that was making it noisy was the inability to slide or move quickly. Dancing on Pledge furniture polish is unsafe but very quiet!

We noticed a strange thing. Stepping and sliding are effortless and quiet, but pivoting, although it is easier than without the polish, is very noisy. Pivoting actually makes a stuttering sound and the movement is a series of tiny jerks instead of one smooth spin. So when you keep moving, it’s quiet and easy, but when you stop and turn slowly, it’s stiff and noisy. The difference, I suppose, has something to do with two kinds friction and their related coefficients: the coefficient of static friction and the coefficient of dynamic friction. I’m a dancer, not a physicist, so I can’t go any further than that with the analysis. But a dancer’s point of view, I can safely (or unsafely) say that it is possible to improve a stiff dance floor by applying Pledge furniture polish!

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