KANSAS CITY, Missouri – Two Kansas City women who are mothers and neighbors now have followers around the world since they decided to start dancing in their garage.

They dance like nobody’s watching, even though hundreds of thousands are watching. I sat down with them to ask them how it all started and to try and dance with them!

“We are neighbors, but it wasn’t until the 2020 lockdown that a real friendship developed between us,” shuffle mom Anna Blanc told me. “Christina and her husband led socially diverse workouts for our neighborhood.”

“I said, ‘Anna, would you learn this dance with me?'” Christina Reynolds told me when I asked her how they got started.

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Four years later, as The Shuffle Mamas, they have over 300,000 followers on TikTok. Then, they say, a few months ago they joined Instagram, where they now have more than 500,000 followers.

“I’m confused, we’re literally shocked,” laughed Reynolds.

“I think it might have something to do with the fact that our age group on Instagram tends to be 30-, 40-, and 50-year-olds,” says Blanc. That’s where I found them before I knew they lived in the Kansas City area!

They showed me the basic steps and I immediately understood why it was so much fun.

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They say they had no real dance experience when they started and started studying other shufflers online who have since become friends.

“The whole EDM world, the electronic dance music world, is very supportive and accepting. And there’s a lot of love, so I think it’s a very safe context to get into,” says Reynolds.

And Anna and Christina have become closer friends.

“There’s a kind of connection that comes with learning something completely new with someone you don’t know that well. That vulnerability,” Blanc told me.

They have now become business partners and have even started an online introductory shuffling course. They say that people from all over the world take their courses.

“And being able to share that with other women was a gift. I’m so grateful,” Blanc said. “We started filming just so we could see ourselves because we didn’t have a mirror.”

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“But then I thought, you know what? Let’s put it on TikTok!” laughed Christina.

Other than improving their dancing skills, not much has changed since their beginnings in their garage.

“We only recently got a tripod,” Blanc told me. “We could never have done it on our own. It’s as if authenticity was the most important thing from the beginning, just being real, being ourselves.”

“We laugh all the time when we dance,” Blanc added. “I mean, we laugh at ourselves and make jokes. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun every time.”

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