Bill Boyd, Editor of American Square Dance Magazine, says:

I am a singer, dance choreographer, entertainer and a spokesperson for my profession.

There’s a new site up: danceinfo.org. Allan Hurst is a Bay Area dancer, caller, and a friend of mine. He’s also an excellent writer, who’s been entertaining the gay and lesbian square dance world for the past several years with his articles for various publications, including the gone-but-still-lamented SquareUp!, and the Call Sheet, the GCA‘s newsletter. Now, all of his articles are available online. Many of them are specific to gay and lesbian square dancing, but at least two have universal square dancing relevance:

• The Joy of Angelling
• Don’t cry over broken squares

In addition, if you’ve ever wondered why, in certain circles, it’s de rigeur to say “my peas are frozen” when doing a mini busy, check out Allan’s Origins of Square Dance Sound Effects. Allan was present at the birth of “my peas are frozen” and now shares that insider information with you.

Allan also shares how he created his site here. We share some similar biases, particularly in his answer to Why is this site so plain?:

Want to see animation? Go to the movies or rent a video. You won’t find dancing baloney on any of my web pages. I despise little cutesy icons (animated or static) as bullet points. I spit on the ground in front of those who would force me to endure even more revolting animated cursors that resemble swarming insects or playful little baby animals. Don’t even get me started on pretentious intro screens or animated menus that take three minutes to load so you can spend three seconds viewing scant content or “coming soon” pages.

You go, Allan!

We differ, however, in that I go out of my way to avoid having to use Micro$oft Word for anything, let alone using it to generate HTML. But it’s a losing effort; even the current GCA president is sending .doc files for the newsletter (fortunately, they open in AppleWorks, and there are rumors that the free text editor included with every copy of Mac OS X 10.3 (codename Panther), will be able to open .doc files).

Check out Allan’s articles; they’re great!

Poor Sacramento-area square dancers. They dance at the California State Fair every year. Different callers, different clubs each night. This year, they’ve been asked to dance every night.

They were just notified by the State Fair officials that they have to submit the name of every dancer, caller, and cuer for screening to see if they’re sex offenders under a Megan’s Law-type of thing. Think of the logistics; if it’s anything like the demos we do here in Albuquerque at the New Mexico State Fair, we never know who’s going to show up; we spread the word and hope that we get at least a square. We always do. (That’s not totally true; some of the dancers get Fair and parking passes, so we know who they are. But there are always some who just show up to help out.)

So now the organizers are scrambling to try to get everybody who plans to dance at the fair’s full name and birthdate. I don’t know what they do about people who “just show up” to dance. I guess that’s not allowed any more.

Boy, I’d sure hate to be a normal (unconnected with square dancing) person in Albuquerque who decides they want to have a square dance and starts looking for a caller. Finding info would require a lot of dedication, and if the prospective dancer isn’t connected to the internet, it would be even harder.

Our yellow pages has a category for Square Dance Callers & Information; the Albuquerque Square Dance Center is listed. If you call that number, you’ll get an answering machine (unless you happen to call during the evening and someone happens to pick up the phone). If you’re lucky, somebody (me) will pick up the messages in a couple of days and get back to you. I have the phone numbers of all the MWSD callers in Albuquerque; I don’t know all the traditional callers, although I have a few connections there.

Next step (at least for me) would be the internet. When I google “albuquerque square dance callers” or “square dance callers albuquerque”, Bill Eyler comes up first. This is good: Bill is, in fact, an Albuquerque caller. And he’s good at doing party nights. But he’s also busy.

I come up within the first five, or at least my Ceder database entry does. This is good; I also am an Albuquerque area caller, and I’m okay at party nights.

The other caller within the first five listings is Andy Shore. Andy’s a caller in the Bay Area; he called for the IAGSDC convention in Albuquerque in 1992.

Moderately interesting is the fact that all three callers are gay.

Googling “square dance callers Albuquerque” also puts Jerry Jestin in the first five listings. Jerry’s not gay; he’s also not an Albuquerque caller, although he does call here a couple of times a year.

Clearly, we have a problem here; seems like people might be more inclined to think about having a square dance if they could actually find info about hiring a caller here in Albuquerque.

Yellow page ads are very expensive; I think even the smallest run around $150-$200/month. Individual callers probably can’t afford that. So that leaves the internet. I don’t understand why a caller wouldn’t have at least some kind of website.

We get comments…if you’d like to see what others are saying, click on the What’s New button button and then click on Comments…this will show the comments from the last 14 days.

Okay, someone noted that I have Randy Owen’s (from the band Alabama) birthday listed as December 16, and it’s really December 13. Yup, that’s right. What’s frightening is that if you google “Randy Owen birthday“, my page comes up first. I’ve fixed the date.

I also made a mistake in this story. I said that Ozark Production’s song Summer Nights wasn’t a standard 64-beat melody. I received email from Brenda Ackerson, one of the producers, pointing out that it is exactly 64 beats 7 times through. I went to the Hanhurst/Supreme site (way easier than trying to find the song on whatever tape it was on) and counted, and, sure enough, she’s right and I’m wrong. Since I was counting while driving (doesn’t everybody listen to their tapes in their car?), the vocal delivery might have caused me some confusion: Keith says “Weave the Ring” and Brenda immediately (no pause to do the weave) says “Swing and promenade”. There’s enough time after to do the full weave and swing/promenade, but it sort of feels like there’s too much music.

Carl Kaye (the subject of the story, also has some interesting comments on why we, as callers, insist on 64-count sequences.

I admit to laziness and flexibility as motives. I want to be able to use a favorite singer at any level and I want to be able to mix and match figures to fit what I’m doing at a particular dance (that’s the flexibility part). I don’t want to have to try to predict what I’m going to need at the time I choose to call the singer and then write special figures to fit that particular need before each dance (that’s the lazy part). I’m much more likely to use a singing call if I don’t have to worry about special choreography. If the song/arrangement is totally outstanding and would fit perfectly into my style, I would probably make the effort…otherwise, there’s lots of other stuff out there.

Check out this great article on square dancing with Tech Squares at MIT.

Students love the dance, they say, because it’s not just dancing it’s thinking on your feet. And, they say, it’s aerobic exercise, a great way to socialize, teaches teamwork and how to listen, and is good wholesome fun.

And here’s another article from a small town newspaper (they’re so local, they don’t even bother to tell us where they’re at…I think they’re out of Greensville, South Carolina).

“Square dancing is a problem-solving activity,” he said. “At each level (of difficulty) you learn a certain number of calls. We are at roughly level seven and we are expected to know 350 to 400 calls. A lot of the calls are very similar. The truly interesting thing to me is when the caller calls the call and you have to execute that call from a position that you didn’t know you could execute it from. One of the original terms was ‘sets in motion.’ You have various geometric patterns that are constantly moving and changing.”

Clark Baker has written a description of his barstool dancing gimmick that I’ve enjoyed at CALLERLAB conventions for the past several years.

As I prepare for calling advanced contra dances, I remember that Noralyn might call Fandango…so I looked it up on the web: Fandango. This has an excruciatingly slow (at least on my browser) animation.

Wow! A lot of work has gone into this: Dance History Archives. Click on a letter to see various dances. Here’s the square dance entry: StreetSwing’s Dance History Archives- Square Dance.

I guess I’m a little behind, but I hadn’t come across MeetUp.com before. It’s a free site to facilitate local face-to-face (meatspace as oppposed to cyberspace) meetings among people with common interests. Not really relevant for square dancers, since our interest requires real people in real time playing together, but I think it’s cool that the internet is being used to facilitate local community. Currently, the largest groups seem to be Dean for President gatherings. Maybe people will get hooked on actual physical meetings, and look for other venues. And what could be better than square dancing–physical contact and interaction, a major sense of teamwork, and a little physical and mental exercise to boot…can’t beat it for overall health.