Thursday was an exciting day for AWK: we danced seven squares during the class part of the evening. That sets a record for this group.

I tried googling “seven squares” just to see what would come up. Mostly quilting and math things. On the third page, I found this reference to a “chain reaction” quilt.

Then I found a page of icebreakers for family reunions. This remnded me of an activity in the women’s room at Cloverleafs & Maple Leafs. The organizers passed out papers with squares. Each square had a characteristic (mostly related to square dancing) in it: things like: “Is a caller”, “has been president of a square dance club”, “has been dancing more than 10 years”, etc. People had to find others that matched the characteristics and get them to initial the matching square. You couldn’t use one person for more than one square.

I was too busy dancing to take part, but those who did, including my girlfriend, had a great time. It worked well at getting a bunch of strangers to learn something about each other.

As I mentioned, I’m in Oregon, where I called a women’s square dance weekend. A dancer requested that I teach the Venus and Mars figure, so I did, and they loved it. I used The Galaxy Song (A 1021), just because it seemed appropriate (Monty Python: The Galaxy Song).

I did a Google-search for Venus and Mars and square dancing and didn’t come up with much. Here’s a page that describes the Venus and Mars figure. And here’s a page of old calls, including Venus and Mars.

Dancers seem to like long, memorized figures–witness the popularity of things like relay the deucey and spin chain and exchange the gears. I’ve mentioned this before: Squarez: Comments: Miscellany, and it continues to hold true for all kinds of groups of dancers. Maybe square dancers would really rather be contra dancers…

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My mom has just started taking square dance lessons here in Southern Oregon with Lantz’s Dantzers. She’s having a great time. While searching for a Lantz’s Dantzers site (haven’t found one), I found this article: Dancing in Southern Oregon from last year, which (a) mistakenly identifies square dancing as the national dance (don’t get me started…) and (b) talks about the decline of square dancing.

Seems to me that if we’re trying to get people interested in square dancing, the last thing we want to emphasize is square dancing’s declining numbers. No one wants to join an activity that’s on a downhill slide; most people want to feel like they’re joining something that’s popular. It’s a dilemma, fer sure.

I’ve started putting pdf versions of my class handouts on line.

• Plus
• A1 (more or less)
• A2

I’ll put up the C1 and C2 notes after I get back from calling a women’s weekend in Oregon. The notes use a square dance font that I put together a few years ago using Fontographer. I don’t know how portable it is (works on a Mac) but if there’s interest, I can put that up also. It’s a PS Type 1 font.

I just added an HTML version of the handout I passed out at the CALLERLAB session on digital music at the 2002 convention. If you prefer, you can download the PDF version here.

I’ve been adding things to this site on my home server (gotta love Mac OS X, with its built-in Apache web server and PHP, and easy-to-add mysql). I’ve got a search feature working, and I’ve added some personal info. I’ll transfer it up to my webhost (Hosting Matters, if that interests you) pretty soon.

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There seem to be hardly any Mac users among square dancers. If there were, it would be way cool to put square dance calendars up as subscribable iCal calendars.

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I need to go back and edit the links to various rec.folk-dancing threads. In the two years that have passed since I wrote regularly, all of the usenet newsgroups archives have transferred from deja to Google Groups. There have been some interesting threads in the past few months, including this one, “What Is MWSD?”, which developed when someone couldn’t find any descriptions of MWSD for people who weren’t already in it. I particularly liked Bill Martin’s description:

MWSD stands for Men and Women who Serve the Devil. Picture standing up
orgies, revellers clad in slinky checkered gingham, string ties sinister in
their simplicity, scratchy old 45rpm records playing music that possesses
the cultists and induces them to writhe disgustingly in little groups of
eight sinners until exhaustion sends them to the lemonade cooler. This
scourge must be stopped! Are you with me?!!

Maybe this is how we should approach marketing square dancing. How about a bumper sticker: “Square Dancing: The Most Fun You Can Have in Groups of Eight!”.

Stuff is missing, but at least the databases are operational. This is a hand-rolled version of the SquareZ weblog. All the old stories are here. Plus, I’ve added and am in the continual process of adding events which might give a caller ideas for a dance on a particular date. Currently, the only navigation is through the calendar. You can also go to the list of all stories and see what was here in the past.

Comments are most welcome. I’ve added a few myself to comment on past stories, and probably will continue to do so.

Many of the web links listed no longer work..but that’s the nature of the web. As I review old stories, I’ll try to fix them, but the pages may just be gone.

We need a link, just because this is supposed to be a blog, so here we go:

Swing Your Partner and Try to Remember All Those Steps. This is from the New York Times, and it does require registration (free). It’s a good article, with an emphasis on the intellectual aspects of square dancing, as well as the fun. Lee Kopman got some good press…too bad it went to “Lee Cotman”.