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.”

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.

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

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.

This is cool: Dance-a-Runi Store. They sell t-shirts with designs based on an overhead view of contra dance moves. Here’s an example of a dosado with twirls (contra dancers stylize their dosados differently than MWSD dancers; instead of doing a body-contact highland fling, they do a whirling dervish thing by spinning all the way through a regular back-to-back dosado):

Thanks to Clark Baker for the pointer to this. Now, if only we had some graphically-pleasing MWSD t-shirts. While we’re on the subject of t-shirts, here’s one of my favorite dance shirts:

From the same Dance-A-Runi site, a compendium of dance-related laws. A couple of good ones:

Forestdale, Rhode Island: It is prohibited to ask anyone to square dance within four hours of having eaten garlic.

Palisades, Ohio: It is illegal to make silly or insulting faces at someone
who is trying to learn how to square dance.

From the same site, a contra-based short story: Sweethearts’ Dance. It’s pretty sappy, but has a lot of dancing stuff in it.

Also, First Impressions of the Contra Dance World. A quote from Jo Mortland’s first Contra Dance weekend:

I realized that this community is not alcohol based, not technology based, not consumer based. There was nothing in that evening that the media tells us we need to have a good time! No wonder it felt odd!

Also, Rune Horoscopes (“It’s a wise person who follows the stars, but it takes a keen awareness to follow the Caller!!”). I’m a Gypsy.