My friend Clark Baker posted the following to the sd-callers email list:

Page 31 of the November 4, 2003 issue of Weekly World News has an article with the headline: Bush to enforce mandatory square dancing law!

In addition to the text, and a picture of Bush, it contains a picture of some people square dancing (wearing SD outfits) with the caption “MOST people outside Texas don’t know a “chasse” from “circle left” — but by the end of January, everyone will be an expert”

It also contains the following great line: Dance “callers” are now being trained at secret locations around the nation, ready for the government-funded square dance blitz due to hit thousands of communities in all 50 states on January 1.

While I am not a regular reader of WWN, I was able to find my copy at the checkout counter of my local grocery store. It has a B&W cover with the following in small type across the very top: Bush To Make Square Dancing Compulsory For All Americans.

Expect your January classes to be much larger than usual.

You may or may not have noticed that SquareZ was inaccessible for a while last week. Believe it or not, SquareZ was the victim of a terrorist attack. Not the target, mind you (a square dance blog as a threat to terrorists?), just a peripheral casualty. My webhost, Hosting Matters, hosted an anti-terrorist site, and was shut down by a denial-of-service attack.

Here are some links about it:

• Newsday.com – Terror Link to Mass ‘Blog’ Outage
• Winds of Change.NET: Blog Wars: Who’s Behind the Attacks?
• Winds of Change.NET: Special Report: Cyber-Attack on Warbloggers
• Haganah B’Internet : : Internet Haganah: a mirror of the site that triggered the DOS attack

I make a real effort not to be political here; after all, square dancing is a pretty apolitical activity. However, one can’t escape its effects.

You’ll want to check out Cal’s website; not only does he have a new edition of Dancing for Busy People, but he’s also added more dances.

I’m on several email lists related to square dancing. Recently, one group has been outstanding in terms of discussion about important issues like complexity and dance evolution. That group is trad-dance-callers. The list started several years ago (the earliest posts I have saved are from August 1998), and recently switched from a private host to yahoogroups, which resulted in a resurgence of activity. As Ridge Kennedy says, the original purpose was to serve as a place to meet for traditional and modern square dance callers:

The original trad-sd list was created specifically to encourage the sharing of dances and traditions and information and history and other good stuff, whatever it might be, and to serve as a bridge across a perceived divide
between the “Traditional” dance community and the “Modern Western” dance community.

At any rate, the discussion has been great recently. If you have an interest in our roots and in successful dance programs that don’t involve a ton of complexity, this is the list to be on. And let the people who get bent out of shape every time someone mentions contra on the sd-callers list keep to that list.

Recently mentioned on trad-dance-callers, two articles about complexity and the problems with the direction that MWSD took:

• David Millstone – Complex Dances
• Chip Hendrickson – Keeping Those Traditional Roots

Dick Oakes, a name I remember from the folk dance heyday back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, has a website full of nostalgia (at least for those of us who danced at folk dance coffee houses in Los Angeles): International Folk Dancing and Teaching More specifically: Folk Dance Coffeehouses. He has a lot of material from The Intersection, where I spent many evenings, especially in the early 70’s after I moved to Los Angeles, and a little bit from Zorbas, where I went occasionally, and Gypsy Camp, where I spent quite a bit of time.

However, I started dancing at The Museum in Pasadena, and it remained my primary coffee house until it closed. It was in a lousy area of Pasadena (at the time; the neighborhood is now part of trendy Old Town), but Pasadena was kind of close to Claremont, where I was going to school. The Museum isn’t mentioned much on the web (it’s also hard to search for, given its generic name), but I’ve found a couple of mentions.

Michael Guthrie says:

I also hung out in “Skid Row” Pasadena, (which is now “Old Town”), at the “Museum”, which was a folk dance coffee house…

Paul Sheldon, in a reminiscence about The Intersection, writes:

One summer, while I was still in high school, a friend invited my sister Hunter and me to go to “The Intersection,” the original folk dance coffeehouse in Los Angeles owned by Rudy Dannes and Athan Karras, and after which “The Museum” in Pasadena where we danced had been patterned.

I don’t remember Michael Guthrie, but I do remember Paul (we knew him as Chip) and his sister Hunter (we knew her as Missy).

Here are some other people that I knew from the Museum: Lydee Scudder and Brad Foster. Brad is the Executive Director of the Country Dance and Song Society, so he’s instrumental in the contra and ECD scene. Lydee now calls ECD (mostly) and contras in Northern California.

When I was hanging out at the Museum, I went out with a guy named Wes Dooley; at the time, his work involved recording various school bands and choruses so they could make albums (how quaint) from their performances. I wonder if this is him: WesDooley.com? It’s kind of embarassing that I don’t recognize him from his photo, but he was definitely in Pasadena during the relevant time period, and he’s continued his work in audio. In fact, it sounds like he’s been very successful; his ribbon mikes get very favorable reviews.

Does this have anything to do with square dancing? Not really…except there’s probably a direct connection between my folk dancing back then and my square dancing now.

From Kennamatic – One chromosome more and I’d be a potato…:

Despite my many mentions of how appalingly bad my academic record was at school I do actually have a degree. It is however with The British Association of American Square Dance Clubs. You get it once you have mastered the first 75 moves of square dancing which include such manouvers as Curly Q and Spin Chain the Gears.

I got involved when I was in my teens. It was one of my friends who heard about it and we decided to go along, a group of about six of us. Following the success of The Goodies single “Stuff That Gibbon”, we referred to the entire pastime as Gibbon Stuffing. Two of us, and a third to a certain extent, got quite into it. We’d travel from our own club out to some of the neighbouring ones and also had two big jaunts, one to RAF Mildenhall where American servicemen held a massive dance and the other over at the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe in Belgium.

One of 10 rules for running the Boston Marathon (in Will’s blog : essays/marathon.html):

Rule 9: Don’t square dance. If you’re going to think good hoe-down songs, don’t start square dancing. It’ll affect your time… a lot.

Most of us have heard Abbott and Costello’s Who’s on First? routine. How about computers with windows?