Japan Opera Foundation Party, part 2

I initially thought that the meeting started at 3:30. That's what I thought it said on my invitation. So, I got there about 3:20 (trying to do the right "Japanese" thing and be 10 minutes early, for once). Well, there were only two or three other people there (the room was set for more than a hundred). Well, 3:30 came and went and very few people had shown up and no one was there that I knew. Upon closer inspection of my invitation(which was in Japanese), the room opened at 3:30 and the meeting was to begin at 4. So, I was 40 minutes early. Who knew?
Well, in typical-for-anywhere-else fashion, the meeting ended up starting at 4:10. At this point, the room was filling up, but still nobody there that I knew, except for some of the leadership. The meeting turned out to be a yearly budget and accounting meeting in very difficult Japanese. But, somehow I got through it, and finally, Shimizu-san and his wife showed up(More about them later).
The meeting ended about 6:00 or so. On the way out, one of the ladies that works for JOF, asked me a very random question. "Do you Dance?" she asked in Japanese. I asked her to be more specific and what she really wanted to know was if I knew how to waltz. Well, I didn't know what to say. I told her that I "sort of" knew how, but that I was not very good. She said that it didn't matter and left it at that.
Well, after we had all gathered on the second floor, she came up to me dragging behind her a younger woman, not really sure how old she was. She then told me that she was my partner. I stammered around and asked her "What are we supposed to be dancing for?". She said that some of the singers were going to perform a scene from "Merry Widow" and that we, along with some other couples, were to waltz with our partners in front of the stage. (TO BE CONTINUED)