I had a great time at ACDC 2003, despite almost not making it because of a 24-hour flu-thang on Thursday. At least, I thought it was some flu-thing, until I googled 24-hour flu and found several references saying there’s no such thing: it’s inevitably food poisoning. Whatever…I was throwing up at 4:30 am on Friday, so I didn’t try to catch my 7:55 am flight to BWI, and then at 7:30 am, I felt fine. So I rearranged flights (try that on any airline other than Southwest, and got in by 10 pm Friday night. I missed Friday’s dancing, but danced the rest of the weekend, including the totally-wonderful Glen Echo contra dance, with Woody Lane calling and New Balance playing.

Woody called a couple of squares, and we had exactly eight dancers (4 C4, 1 C3B, 2 C3A, 1 C1; out of those, 3 MWSD callers and 1 contra caller) from ACDC, so we managed to square up as a group for one of the squares. (I later heard a comment about the “club” dancers squaring up together…I think it was an observational as opposed to negative comment.) The first square featured square thru, and basically used the “chicken-plucker” pattern (all the MWSD callers recognized it, even though he started “across the street” with a square thru 2). The break was a standard allemande-left-to-an-allemande-thar-shoot-the-star-to-another-thar, shoot-the-star-to-your-partner routine. The second square had a little mini-rip’n’snort, wring-the-dishrag thing (I don’t think I’d try it with the aging MWSD crowd), and the break had ladies chaining in the middle while the gents did pull-bys around the outside. It probably has a name, but I don’t know it.

He also called a Sicilian Circle dance that involved two square thru 3’s (I liked it that he built on the square thru that he had already used in the square).

By the end of the evening, I’d gotten more exercise in the 3 hours of contra than I had in 2 days of MWSD (except for the last C1 square, where 16 people danced the whole tip “as couples”–a sweaty, aerobic, and fun activity for sure).