Just talked to my brother in Eugene, OR. He’s mildly interested in square dance lessons, so he decided to do a little websurfing to find info on what’s available in Eugene. He didn’t want to call people…he just wanted to do a little exploration…and, being a modern kind of guy, he assumed he could do that on the net. I don’t know what kind of search criteria he used, but he couldn’t find anything. Moreover, when he finally decided to pick up a phone and call the Emerald Square and Round Dance Center (which he knew about because he’d been to a dance that I’d called there), there was no answering machine.

Okay, I started surfing while we were talking (love having two phone lines…would love DSL or cable even more) and pretty quickly made my way to Square Dance Directory in Oregon Emerald Empire, which had a link to Emerald Square and Round Dance Center. Too bad that page (a) hadn’t been updated since 1998 (I could tell because the only event listing was for a 1998 event) and (b) had no links to clubs that dance there. It’s essentially a dead end.

Okay, back to the previous page. Quickly zip down to the bottom of the page to turn off the music (I’m glad they provide the option to turn it off, but I wish they’d give me the option to turn it on instead). Find a club in Eugene, Whirl-A-Ways. Go to that page, but it looks like a template page (even has the same stupid music…quick, turn it off) and I can see no signs that it’s been updated since its creation. No special events listed…talks about lessons in September, but there’s no year…there is an email address and a phone number.

Let’s try another page, Danebo Circle Eight: same template, same music, some events listed (last one in 1999). Talks about lessons, but again, no year. But! there’s a URL for the caller! I’ll go to Kirby & Christina’s Home Page. And hark! there’s a link to Danebo Circle 8, a different page for the club. It’s got a picture, it’s got some color, it’s got some signs of life (upcoming events listed through April 2000). It’s got a lessons page (which also has no date, but at least I have some faith that lessons actually will start in September since the rest of the site is being kept up-to-date).

Well, I could continue (and I probably will, in an attempt to find a suitable place for lessons for my brother and his wife). But there’s a moral here: people do use the web to try to get information. It shouldn’t be so hard to get it. Web sites should be kept up-to-date. It should be easy to get a list of all the lessons in a city. Square dance centers should have at least an answering machine.

At the Albuquerque Square Dance Center (oh well, this page hasn’t been updated since 1999), a caller, Rich Stewart, donated an old 486 machine with some freeware (came with the modem) telephone software that allows the Center to present a lot of information using a hierarchical system of menus controlled by the caller’s (telephone not square dance) touch-tone phone. The local callers association spearheaded this after the only square dance clothing store in town shut down. We realized that there were only two listings in the Yellow Pages under Square Dance: the store and the center. So the center, which previously had no answering machine, would become the defacto place that people would call to find out about square dancing in Albuquerque. It became very important to make sure that there would be something to answer the phone at the center. Rich did a great job setting up the system…and, of course, having old hardware around helps. But old hardware is cheap; it might as well be answering phones instead of sitting around becoming even more obsolete.

Looking for more ideas for themes to liven up your regular dances? Try 365 Reasons To Party. Of course, tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day, so you can drag out all your Irish tunes, but did you know that it’s also Jerry Lewis’ birthday? Now I’ve never been a big fan of Jerry Lewis, but the French (for some inscrutable reason) love him. So you could do a whole French thing…now there’s an obscure connection that only a die-hard movie fan would get.

---

Looks like Bill Heyman has done a redesign on Western Square Dancing. Still some blue and green, but the left hand navigation bar is now yellow, which makes it easier to read the text. I’m not crazy about the mix of serif and non-serif fonts, though…kind of looks like the style sheets aren’t being applied consistently.

---

Looking to cut a record? Alliance Records is the first site I’ve seen that spells out the details: what you’ll pay, what you’ll get. Unfortunately, the site isn’t fully fleshed out yet; there are still some empty pages.

How about this for a good domain name: lovetodance.com. Too bad it’s an under construction home page.

Here’s someone who feels about partner dancing the way I feel about square dancing: Social Partner Dancing. She says:

I love partner dancing. It is the best thing I have done for myself in this life of mine. As with many of my friends it began more or less as something new to do. But I find it is much, much more than that. It has become a way of life.

I also like the graphics…modern and fun.

I’d like to thank Tommy Wells and Lou-Mac records for putting out YMCA (LM 206) as a singing call. I’ve volunteered to help a second grade class do a square dance exhibition. While it would probably be more “authentic” to use some kind of banjo/fiddle blue-grassy hoedown, it’s much more delightful to watch second-grade eyes light up at hearing some music they recognize. And I have to admit that my goal is not necessarily to show square dancing as it was, but rather to show something that kids might actually relate to.

---

Speaking of square dance records, I hope more record producers will take advantage of modern technology and put samples of their new releases on line. ESP is doing it. ABC has Real Audio files of some, but not all, of their records (and not their newest ones). Rockin’ M Records has Real Audio files of their latest releases. Some are on their home page, but there are also some on the pages for individual callers…gotta dig a little. C-Bar-C also has some; same format “jukebox” as ESP (interesting…they’re both on a Swedish server).

---

I’ve heard this survey talked about at a CALLERLAB convention, but never saw a write-up. It was done in 1998 in Canada.

---

Good reasons to join in the craze and come Square Dancing: one of the best online writeups I’ve seen.

Where does square dancing belong in the various categorized directories? Most put it under Dance, which is under Performing Arts. But I consider square dancing (and other participatory dance forms like folk dancing and contra dancing) to be a Recreation or maybe a Hobby. While some groups do exhibitions, performing is not a major part of the activity. Yet if it goes there, people may not find it because they’re looking for under Dance.

As a subcategory editor for the Open Directory, I’m going to propose a link under one of the Recreation subcategories…if people are browsing for a recreation, I’d like them to consider square dancing…or folk dancing, or contra dancing, or swing dancing…

---

Speaking of swing, want to learn to dance? bustamove! learn to dance. This is cool…get a basic lesson for free; if you can’t get the move from that, pay a buck for the more detailed lesson on the same move. What’s also cool is that this site got a reference in the Earthlink email weekly…how many millions of people are all hopping their way over to bustamove?

Learn to square dance on the web? GeoMotion, a CD-ROM based learning system is the closest I’ve seen; as bandwidth gets wider, I would think the GeoMotion system could be web-based.

Of course, the problem with learning to square dance is that one needs more than one person. Even the bustamove site deals with the issue by telling people that they can learn the moves by themselves (this is, perhaps, overly optimistic, but at least one only needs two people to learn couple dance moves). GeoMotion requires four people; regular square dancing requires eight.

---

Square Dance World no longer has a callers database…well, actually, it does, but it’s no longer listed on the main page, and the only way to get to it is to do a search. I searched on “jensen” and then from my name, I could get to the “I/J” callers. I think it’s a smart decision; send interested folks over to Vic Ceder’s caller database.

Found a new site, American Square Dancer, an online magazine “designed to offer up-to-date schedule of events, lessons and news thoughout the nation.” It looks like a one-person (Rob Scribner) production, along with a couple of sister publications, Washington Square Dancer and Oregon Square Dancer Magazine. Rob was a teen caller in the Pacific Northwest, dropped out of calling for about 10 years, and started again in 1999. He lives in Oregon, so the Oregon site has the most info; the other sites contain the same stuff, without the Oregon-specific info.

I like his editorial (although he does have a slight homonym problem) and his focus on teen dancers. (Where Have All the Teens Gone?). I hope he’s able to keep things up; it’s nice to have somebody with both vision (starting up a national online publication) and web know-how (looks like Rob might own a web-hosting, web-design service, which is offering special packages to square dance groups: Web Support Program.

I think Rob may see this as a profit-making venture, where he’ll be able to charge for listings (see his introduction. (He’s only accepting listings through September 2000.) He may need to rethink that, since there are other sites that list events for free, and instead try to go for an advertiser-supported model.

---

I’d forgotten about this: Patricia Wahle’s Dancer Survey. It’s several years old but contains some interesting info about why people (including younger people) square dance. Of course, the more interesting survey would be with people who tried square dancing and rejected it, or who thought about trying it and didn’t.

---

Many square dance pictures: Mike Argue’s photo albums. Here we have a photographic record of a lot of square dances; you can see what square dancing is like, at least in the midwest.

Mike appears to have a lot of good stuff on his site, but I’m having a hard time getting to it because my browser doesn’t like his scripts, so I don’t get the navigation links. However, I did manage (by convoluted means that you don’t want to hear about) to get to his Square Dance Greeting Cards site…an idea whose time has not (yet) come. It’s not only that the graphics are the same (tired) graphics that one sees on virtually every square dance website (probably because they’re in the public domain) but also that retrieving the card once it’s been sent is no simple one-click operation. In other web-based greeting card setups, the recipient gets a link in an email message and then just clicks on the link: voila! she’s transported to the greeting card. With this one, I (yes, I sent a greeting card to myself to check it out) had to navigate to the greeting card page (no easy task with my apparently non-compliant browser), click on the view button, and then enter in the code number that was sent in the email notification. Now I know Amazon has one-click buying patented, but this was ridiculous. How hard would it be to encode the card id number and Mike’s referral info into the URL that the recipient can click in her email message?

Now what would be cool would be to license Stan Burdick’s cartoons to put on greeting cards; they’d be funny, might even be relevant to a particular holiday, and would be different from anything else currently on the web.

If you’re looking for a source for some MIDI square dance music, check out Peanutjake’s site. The tunes sound artificial, but since they’re in MIDI format, you could change the instrumentation or use more realistic sounding instruments. There are also figures for some of the tunes (Peanutjake is interested in traditional square dance) in JPG format; I think he scanned them in from books, but I don’t recognize the source.

---

I’ve an idea for a fund-raising event featuring different kinds of dance: let people try all kinds of recreational dance forms to see what they like. I found Dance for Health, a site promoting dance events to raise money to promote dance to improve health. I couldn’t find a date on it; I guess if one is interested, one will have to email them. They do mention square dancing as one of the dance forms.

---

If you haven’t seen this video, Cool Moves, you should. It’s designed to promote square dancing to pre-teens, and focuses on the 1998 Pacific Northwest Teen Square Dance Festival. Modern production values and a pretty good script make this an important asset in any effort to get middle school kids interested in dancing.

More good ideas from the Canadian Square and Round Dance Society: From the PR, Marketing, Public Relations page:

A Graphic master repository will be established and accessed through the CSRDS web site. This would provide one location for storing and accessing square dance graphic materials – avoiding duplication of efforts and providing for easiest sharing across the activity. The older images commonly seen on dance posters will begin the collection. New updated graphics are urgently needed! Our dance movement has evolved and our collection of graphics needs to modernize.

I really agree on needing to update our graphics and on making them available to clubs.

Here’s another compendium of recruiting info from Canada: Promoting Square/Round Dancing

Want to see some pictures with young people dancing (again from Canada)? Try here: Teen Festival 99 Gallery.

How about a teen view of What Makes a Good Caller?

Directories vs. databases: Since I’ve become an editor for the Open Directory Project, I’ve been perusing a lot of lists of links. Obviously, it’s a major chore to keep link lists up-to-date (there are 563 links on the Square and Round Dance Web Ring; presumably most of those would belong in a comprehensive directory of square dance links). One solution is to put the burden on the site owners by establishing a database of links. USDA is doing this. A disadvantage is that there’s no human doing any categorizing, evaluating, and organizing. This makes it hard to browse. Another disadvantage is that not every site owner will take the time and effort to enter their site into the database. So far, there are eight listings in the USDA db, three of which are USDA related. I wonder if site owners know that on March 15, USDA plans to eliminate its links page and rely totally on the database (at least, that’s what it says on the link page…we’ll see if it really happens).

---

Sleeping and square dancing: if you’re learning to square dance, it looks like a good night’s sleep is a good thing: For Better Learning, Researchers Endorse “Sleep on It” Adage. Hmmm…I’d better think about this when I go off for my killer learn C3A in one weekend next month! (You have to register with the NYT site to read the article; the bottom line of the article is that people who get at least six hours of sleep that includes both slow wave and REM sleep after learning a new skill will do better on later tests of the skill than people who don’t. The theory is that you need the sleep to consolidate the neural connections that are formed while learning.)

This is cute: All My Lesbian and Gay Square Dancing Children. It’s a soap-opera style radio show produced by the Ottawa gay square dancing club, Ottawa-Hull Date Squares. Straight folks might be interested in the fact that in order to sell square dancing, the gay club has to fight the stereotypes of straight square dancing. There’s also some calling (Paul Waters calling “Pink Cadillac”), and an interview with Paul where he describes the San Francisco convention, Stars, Thars, and Cable Cars.

---

Found a site for the National Square Dance Directory. This site shows why one should hesitate about putting a site “on line” before its time; looks like an incompletely filled in template site. Seems natural to allow clubs to update their listings on line (and perhaps even to display the listings on line; my guess is that people would still buy the book for the convenience of having it available when a computer isn’t). However, that option isn’t offered. Instead, they’re offering to accept your listing for a mere $4.95/month…again, I think that’s the template talking, not the National Square Dance Directory. Since the pages haven’t been updated since October 1999, perhaps it’s a trial site that bit the dust. Too bad: their URL is squaredancedirectory.com.