Here are a few pictures (mostly post-processed to look blurry from motion) from a traditional square dance in San Francisco, with music by the Foghorn Stringband. Looks like fun!

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.