This is a love story involving a couple, a Latin dance revolution, a village in Spain and the Syttende Mai parade. Then again isn’t every Syttende Mai parade really a love song to Ballard?

Jenny Uribe Baird teaches aerobics at Ballard Health Club and has been the Aerobics Director at the club for a year. She arrived in Ballard by way of Colombian parents, Hong Kong, St. Louis, Taiwan and a visit to a village in Spain where she decided to wanted to be married someday. Fifteen years later, one year ago, that’s exactly where she got married.

Now that Jenny has decided that the Ballard Health Club should participate for the first time in the Syttende Mai parade with a continuous Zumba dance be assured that she will likewise make it so.

Ballard has definitely outgrown the moth eaten myth of “sleepy Scandinavian” neighborhood that people alternately mourn or bemoan. How else could it attract so many restaurants and clubs, artists and writers, filmmakers and world travelers? Take Jenny for instance. In Hong Kong Jenny managed the Asian PGA tour, which included the likes of Tigers Woods on a winning year. She’s loved Latin dance all of her life, with her father as her first, and favorite, dance partner. So how is it that Ballard is where she works and hopes to raise a family when the time comes?

Meanwhile at all the local health clubs an exercise started in Colombia and trademarked as Zumba® Fitness in 2001 has spread to 125 countries, including the one known as Ballard. The Ballard Health Club class description reads, “Zumba fuses Latin rhythms and easy to follow moves to create a dynamic fitness program…”

In Jenny’s words, “It’s fun; it’s passionate. There’s no right or wrong. People call it exercise in disguise.” She loves that it blends world music…Latin, Greek, Indian, with different types of dance, from merengue, salsa, hip-hop…

I would describe the experience as the most fun that I’ve ever had while exercising while generating the most sweat. I’ve been hooked on Zumba since my first Thursday class with Nathalie at Ballard Health Club in January 2010 - despite my complete inability to learn any dance steps. When the Tuesday instructor, Daniel, returned from a trip to his native Brazil the obsession expanded (as everyone who has watched Daniel dance understands).

In addition to the late afternoon classes Jenny has added a third class that she teaches on Thursday mornings (where I overhead an 81 year-old participant echo, “This is so fun!”). At the end of April Jenny invited class members to represent Ballard Health Club by participating in a Zumba routine for the Syttende Mai parade. She sees it as community outreach; a way to showcase the club’s vibrancy. I see it on par with climbing Columbia Tower.

In class I try to hide behind pillars in order to mask my inability to salsa. Besides Jenny is so absolutely dark-eyed, Latin gorgeous being in her presence revives my high school desire for complete invisibility. Only Jenny is so warm and upbeat that it’s impossible not to want to know her better, if only to draft off the amazing energy that someone with no body fat can generate. While she tried to talk me into the street dance plan we somehow established that she’d gotten married in the Costa Brava village I was visiting last month. I insisted on seeing a wedding picture on the spot and foolishly put my name on parade list.

Two years ago, in May, Jenny met her future husband Brit Baird for the first time in person after communicating on-line for several weeks. They laid eyes on each other (very happily) at the designated meeting spot in front of the Majestic Bay Theater on Market Street. They proceeded to tapas at Ocho and drinks on Ballard Avenue and parted back at the movie theater. Two minutes later he called her, “Do you want to go dancing?”

He’d asked the right question of someone who has been dancing all of her life. He was initially surprised at her choice of wedding venue (he’s from Gig Harbor) but he came around to her dream of getting married in Cadaques. Jenny’s experienced in planning international events - which clearly qualifies her for Ballard’s Syttende Mai parade - putting together a wedding on the coast of Spain was no problem.

Just days after their first wedding anniversary, on the 17th of May, Jenny and any surviving members of her Ballard Health Club Zumba “dancers” will finish the parade route in front of the Majestic Bay. It will be a fitting convergence of world music, a local health club and an international love story.