I found it: one of my favorite passages about square dancing. I think this comes the closest to describing what I find so appealing about the activity. It’s from a 1993 book, Up the Infinite Corridor by Fred Hapgood.

But while we’re on the subject of descriptions of square dancing, this page is linked to from almost everywhere. It’s basically a rehash of the CALLERLAB “New Song and Dance” brochure of a few years ago. I wish we could get brochure with pictures showing people in regular clothes. Or maybe some pictures from Tech Squares.

And then there was the description of challenge dancing from Rolling Stone (by Julian Dibbell, August 21, 1997, p. 76):

Hot Geek Scene: Challenge Square Dancing

Square dancing at the challenge level is more like a fast-moving game of chess than a hoedown. The attire is running shoes and shorts; the locale is typically urban (with lively scenes near high-tech academic centers like Stanford and MIT); the music could be anything from Broadway to techno; and the aim is to perform mind-bogglingly complex maneuvers on cue, following the rapid-fire instructions of the designated “caller.” When nobody’s screwing up, the choreography can mesmerize – like a Rubik’s Cube in graceful motion. “Challenge dancing is square dancing taken to its puzzle-solving extreme,” wrote longtime caller Lynette Bellini on her Web page. She recommends the activity to anyone with “a bent for algorithmic thinking and problem solving,” and notes that about 75 to 80 percent of challenge dancers have high-tech backgrounds. Not that everyone who challenge-dances crunches algorithms for a living, of course. But then, not everyone who discoed in the ’70s was a gay man, nor was every ’80s break dancer an inner-city teen.

Another thing from Tech Squares; you have to know your square dancing really well for this puzzle.

I’ve been websurfing today…there are 512 sites on the Square and Round Dancing Web Ring. Boy howdy, there are some ugly sites out there. What’s with red type? Do people think it makes their sites easier to read?

I also found out that the sd-callers mailing list, which is probably the main internet discussion area for square dance callers, is not officially archived anywhere. Too bad; stuff goes through there that really shouldn’t be lost.

There are no square dance sites out there that I feel any need to check daily. There’s just not enough change going on, and I don’t know of any sites that are updated on a daily basis. Vic Ceder’s probably comes closest…I know he’s in the process of building additional tools, so I check back to see what he’s done.

Ever wondered who’s got the good square dance domain names? You could go off and do the research, but here’s a start:

Square Dance Sites with Good Domain Names:
• SquareDancing: This site is trying to be all things square dance. It has an events database, with about 113 listings. It offers subdomain hosting: you can be www.squaredancing.com/yourname. It’s working on a vendor area. It has a database of callers with about 112 records, an organization database (37 records), and a club database with 177 records.
• SquareDance: This name is owned by someone in Fort Collins, Colorado. It’s parked at a site hosting service, but has no active pages. What a shame!
• Square-Dancing: Note the hyphen. Looks like they’re in the business of selling website hosting; they have square-dancing and square-dance for all three toplevel domains(.com, .org, and .net).
• Dosado: This site was started by Rob French, a caller in northern California. Rob got involved in an internet startup and Bill Heyman, owner of Supreme Audio has recently taken over. So it’s being updated frequently, and Bill is soliciting new and updated listings. It’s got the modern e-commerce look: blue and green, left-hand-links, two content columns.
• Dosido: American Square Dance magazine’s website. This is the general purpose national square dance magazine. It takes a few clicks, but one can find links to clubs, callers, organizations, and other sites.
• CircleLeft: They’re hoping to become the “ultimate destination for square dancers,” but they’re still under construction. What they have going for them is very modern internet design: teal, purple, and a whorl in the logo.
• SquareThru: A local site for the Houston Square and Round Dance Council. Pretty skimpy links, but they will send you off to Western Square Dancing (aka Dosado).
• SwingThru is owned by a container loading system named (what else?) Swing Thru.
• Swing is, of course, a hardcore site.
• YellowRock is a computer system for optometrists and opticians.
• Caller is owned by the Corpus Christi Caller Times, a daily newspaper.
• SquareDanceCaller is owned by Bruce Simpers, a caller in Maryland. No links.
• SDCaller is owned by someone in Japan. It goes to a blank page.