A few years ago, the gay A&C fly-in was at Fallen Leaf Lake (off of Lake Tahoe) (it’ll be there again in 2004). In between dancing, we managed to find time to do a little kayak square dancing…eight folks out on the lake, with a caller shouting calls from the dock. Well, I just found a site devoted to canoe dancing, including a page of animated dosidos (check out the quintuple do-si-do, circular variant).

Speaking of dosidos, here’s a teaser for an article from the Old Time Herald (too bad the whole thing isn’t online):

Perhaps the most parodied square dance figure is the Do-si-do. Ask people to imitate square dancing and they will invariably cross their arms and dance around each other passing back-to-back. This cliché is an indelible image in the minds of the American non-dancing public, and it often appears whenever square dancing is portrayed in the media; on television, in cartoons, and in Hollywood films. You may recall images of Jed Clampett, Bugs Bunny, or possibly even Scarlett O’Hara, with arms crossed as they Do-si-doed. This is not the way it is done at community dances throughout the country; veteran dancers do not dance this way. Seeing dancers with their arms crossed is an easy way to identify the inexperienced dancers out on the dance floor.

Over the years I have become increasingly interested in the origins of the figures that I dance and call, and I have discovered that the Do-si-do, as simple as it may seem, has a story behind it. In fact there are as many stories and hypotheses as there are different versions of dance figures known by this name, only one of which is the clichéd back-to-back version that most people would associate with square dancing.

Here’s a story about the Coon Dog Day Square Dance Debacle.