Those of you who’ve read my past rantings know that I dislike animations and music on web pages. However, I ran across this dancing gif, and enjoy it enough to let it stay here until it scrolls off.

I don’t know how long this link will last, but while it does, here’s a nice article on the Diablo Dancers in the San Francisco Chronicle: Gay and lesbian dance clubs offer a square deal for all.

Check out this thread: “why square dance at contras?”. It’s not a MWSD vs. Contra, but rather a traditional square (the kind of squares called at contra dances vs. contra.

One comment by Bob Stein:

With the trends of modern urban contradancing (I will call it MUC from now on– thanks, Dudley, for making the difference apparent), calling has been reduced to a few prompts done a few times through the dance. This has to do with the desire of MUC dancers to focus on spins, twirls, flourishes, flirting, and a machine-like timing. To paraphrase Seinfeld: “Not that there’s anything wrong with this!” It’s just that the nature of MUC seems more oriented to providing this mechanized flow that dancers have come to expect. Square dancing demands that you actually listen as you dance. Your brain and body are engaged on a different level. I would imagine that MUC dancers would need to develop these skill sets to be able to experience square dancing with more enjoyment.

I occasionally google “square dance blog” or “square dance weblog” just to see what else is out there.

This time I came across an interesting read: the weblog (the diary kind, not the link commentary kind) of a gay man who started taking square dance lessons at Western Star in January this year. He’s competitive, constantly judges himself and others (including the callers), and started taking Plus lessons with Foggy City before he finished his Mainstream class. He has a boyfriend, goes to church, plays Scrabble, works in computers, square dances, and has casual sex whenever (as a lesbian, I just don’t get the concept of a live-in boyfriend and casual sex, but I know it’s pretty common with gay guys…whatever). I went through his whole blog, searching on “square”, so I think I caught all the square dance references; it’s a good look at the gay square dance community in San Francisco. If you’re interested, start here (January – April) and then move here for May and the future. Oh yes, today’s his birthday.

Another one that turned up is a single-entry blog (meaning the person only wrote once) at squaredance.blogspot.com. The entry had nothing to do with square dancing, and there was no explanation as to why this person (a young girl, I think) chose the “squaredance” name.

I found a blog written by a woman who square dances with her family…but there’s no mention of square dancing (or any dancing, for that matter) in the blog.

Boots In Squares, the IAGSDC club in Palm Springs, has a couple of videos (Windows Media) up on their web site. The first one (link on the photo) appears to be a video of their demo at a (probably) gay pride event. The video quality is really wretched, but the sound is good. Deborah Carroll-Jones is calling. First song is “Brown Eyed Girl”, second is “Keep It In the Middle of the Road”, third is a patter (don’t recognize the record), then “Don’t Cry for Me, Pasadena” (about 14 minutes into the video), followed by “Hot, Hot, Hot” and “Shut Up and Kiss Me”. Although the video quality is bad, the music and calling is fun, and would be a good exposure to square dancing for someone who thinks it’s all fiddle/banjo stuff.

The second video shows the Desert Pride 2000 Parade, starting off with a lot of very noisy motorcycles (probably a dykes on bikes group, although the video is so wretched that it’s hard to tell). The square dancers show up about 27 minutes into the video; Deborah’s calling.

There was a problem at the place where my webhost (Hosting Matters) has some servers, including the one SquareZ is on, which resulted in SquareZ being down all day (and also resulted in no email for me all day…almost a vacation…). Hosting Matters is in the process of moving all of its servers from the NAC to another location, but my machine (gaia…love the name) hasn’t been transferred yet. Maybe this latest unfortunate incident will speed up the process.

At any rate, if you tried to check in on Wednesday and couldn’t, my apologies.

A couple of people have commented on some older postings. (You can always see if there are new comments by checking the “What’s New” page.) Barbara, who competed in the Northwest Teen Competitions in the 70’s, notes that competition kept her interest in square dancing alive and is instrumental in keeping her kids interested in square dancing.