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.

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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).

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

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

I think there’s lots we can learn from other dance forms (and vice versa, of course). So here’s a page on club organization which has some useful info: How to Start a Folkdance Club

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Looking for a different way to approach square dancing? Check out Geomotion: two-couple dancing using square dance terminology.

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It’s sometimes hard, when you’re calling for the same group of people week after week, to come up with ideas to keep the dancing fresh. One way is to focus on music and themes. Check out Funky March Holidays for some interesting days that one could commemorate musically. For example, did you know that this Friday, March 10, is the anniversary of the day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell said his few words to Watson? There are a bunch of singing calls related to telephones, including “Why Haven’t I Heard from You” which starts off with “Back in 1876 an old boy named Bell invented a contraption that we know so well.” And Saturday, March 11 is Lawrence Welk’s birthday. Seems like almost all of MacGregor’s records sound like Welk arrangements.

How to find possibilities for a Lawrence Welk night:

• Go to CDNow, do a search on Lawrence Welk, and look at the contents of some of his CDs. I looked at one called Biggest Hits, and found that I had three of the listed cuts: Twelfth Street Rag, Peg O’ My Heart, and MacNamara’s Band. 16 Most Requested Songs contains Ain’t She Sweet and Beer Barrel Polka. These are just records that I happen to have…you probably have others that are listed.
• Check out one of the several web sites on Lawrence Welk, like The Lawrence Welk Show. You might get some ideas on possible theme-related songs. For example, just about anything with “champaigne” in the title would be appropriate.

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Went to PlanetClick, yet another directory of web sites. This one allows anyone (except Mac users) to rate websites (I wonder if that affects the ratings…no one who uses a Mac has any influence). I couldn’t figure out how to suggest sites to add, but maybe that’s part of the no-Mac-users rating system.

They do have some square dancing sites; there are about 53 “rated” (by non-Mac-users) sites. Then it looks like the find request is forwarded to Google, so a ton of non-rated sites show up. Now, aren’t you curious as to who got the top rating? Six sites (one of which is no more) are tied with a rating of 8, but the one that comes up first? Jim and Jean Square Dance Company, Jim Cholmondeley’s site.

Speaking of directories, I’ve become a square dance editor for the Open Directory Project.

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Does anyone else think it’s tacky that the National Square Dance Convention websites (a) don’t have their own URL and (b) are hosted on commercial sites? To be fair, only Baltimore is on a site with ads (AOL Hometown), but Anaheim has some totally unmemorable URL at EarthLink. St. Paul has actually obtained its own URL (51nsdc.com). Kudos to them for joining the computer age. However, it seems to me that the national committee ought to get a good url (nsdc.com and nsdc.org are both taken, but long domain names have become available, so nationalsquaredanceconvention.com is available), and provide subdomain hosting for the annual conventions.

Consider the IAGSDC: not only do we have conventions with memorable names instead of numbers (this year, Crack the Crab is in Baltimore) but we also have an umbrella organization with an appropriate URL that provides subdomain hosting for member organizations.

I was out of town for almost a week, and, while I thought I’d be able to update this site on the road (I was staying with people who had internet connections, and I can update from any web browser), in practice, playing games of dominos with my 99-year-old grandmother took precedence. As it should.

To bring in some square dance relevance, there were about twenty adults and kids at my grandmother’s birthday party. I used a square dance record (the Royal record with the song done in four different musical styles) for the obligatory “Happy Birthday” song with the cake (it’s amazing how much better the singing is with an instrumental background). Then someone asked if I could call to “Happy Birthday”, so I played a Blue Star version with a square dance beat and tempo and called to some phantom dancers (of course, they danced perfectly). Then some people decided that they wanted to try a little square dancing, so we cleared some space and 8 people, including my grandmother (99, remember?), got up and circled, starred, and dosidoed. I played a waltz and a polka and the Hokey Pokey (what if it is what it’s all about) and the Bunny Hop and the Chicken Dance…it’s amazing what a little music and some fun dances will add to a party. Although I played the original Ray Anthony version of the Hokey Pokey, I really like the Brave Combo version from their CD, The Hokey Pokey In fact, I really like most Brave Combo music…check it out for those times when you need to play a polka.

Wow! Since I went to the Brave Combo site to get the Hokey Pokey reference, I found that they have another CD with great group dances: Group Dance Epidemic. This one includes songs from the Hokey Pokey CD plus some others like the Mexican Hat Dance, Mana Vu and the Bunny Hop (rather than the Bunny Dirge…). I also found out that Brave Combo won a Grammy in the best Polka album category.

Want to add some variety to your calling? Check out Jim Penrod’s OLD CALLS page, and resurrect some of those fun, old-timey calls. The seniors at Palo Duro and Highland really like Grand Spin; I think it’s the combination of a nice long call that allows them to dance and fun, march-style music.

Don’t you think square dancing would be the perfect “neurobic” exercise? Get your mental and physical exercise at the same time. (OnHealth: Exercise Your Brain).

If you join the site, you can vote on various surveys, like this: Square Dance Attire

Nice website: Square Dance and Square Dance Caller – Cliff Brodeur and the Square One Band! Nice design, good text emphasizing parties (although it looks like Cliff also calls for regular MWSD clubs), endorsement from Pete Seeger! I think a site like this would be useful for helping to market parties and ONS’s. Not to mention that he’s got a good domain: squaredance-hoedown.com.

Here’s another good domain name: squaredanceworld.com. Looks like another portal and subdomain reseller. Whoever the owner is (couldn’t tell from the site) must have collected info from somewhere (maybe Bob LaFleur’s site?) because I’m in there, with an older email address. This is a frames-based site, and if you click on a link in the callers directory, the caller’s web page will show up in a frame surrounded by squaredanceworld stuff. Yuck. The site has been updated recently (like yesterday).

A dance directory site, with a listing for square dancing and about 14 sites: Dance Directory. I’m always glad to see Western Square Dancing listed among all the individual clubs because then I know that anyone who wanders here will get to a portal-type of site.

Debi Bliss says, ‘Our activity wasn’t built by the experienced …. it
was built by the enthusiastic.’ She has an excellent site, Square Dancing! and also hosts the Square Dance Article Co-Op, with 106 articles on square dancing.

I’ve written an article on “Building a Web Site”.

While writing it, I went to SelfPromotion.com’s tips on getting listed in Yahoo, where Robert Woodhead notes “Yahoo is without a doubt the single most important index on the Internet (though Open Directory is rapidly gaining on them!)” So of course, I had to go to Yahoo to see what sites are listed under Yahoo! Arts:Performing Arts:Dance:Square Dance.

There are six subcategories: Apparel, Events, Groups, Organizations, Regional Information, and Web Directories. There are 10 sites listed at the top level. I thought it was interesting that Julie Mangin’s article on The State Folk Dance Conspiracy: Fabricating a National Folk Dance is there.

Open Directory: There is a square dancing category, Open Directory – Arts: Performing Arts: Dance: Folk Dancing: Country and Western: Square Dancing, with 44 listings. Robert Woodhead says, “The Open Directory Project, formerly called NewHoo, is an “Open Source” directory much like Yahoo, but edited by volunteers. As ODP is now the directory listing source for Netscape, AOL Search, HotBot and Lycos, and will soon be used by many other search engines, including Altavista, it is in the “big leagues” and is a must to submit to.”

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One can find square dance references anywhere: Construction Calamities – Urban Legends and Folklore.