A few years ago, the gay A&C fly-in was at Fallen Leaf Lake (off of Lake Tahoe) (it’ll be there again in 2004). In between dancing, we managed to find time to do a little kayak square dancing…eight folks out on the lake, with a caller shouting calls from the dock. Well, I just found a site devoted to canoe dancing, including a page of animated dosidos (check out the quintuple do-si-do, circular variant).

Speaking of dosidos, here’s a teaser for an article from the Old Time Herald (too bad the whole thing isn’t online):

Perhaps the most parodied square dance figure is the Do-si-do. Ask people to imitate square dancing and they will invariably cross their arms and dance around each other passing back-to-back. This cliché is an indelible image in the minds of the American non-dancing public, and it often appears whenever square dancing is portrayed in the media; on television, in cartoons, and in Hollywood films. You may recall images of Jed Clampett, Bugs Bunny, or possibly even Scarlett O’Hara, with arms crossed as they Do-si-doed. This is not the way it is done at community dances throughout the country; veteran dancers do not dance this way. Seeing dancers with their arms crossed is an easy way to identify the inexperienced dancers out on the dance floor.

Over the years I have become increasingly interested in the origins of the figures that I dance and call, and I have discovered that the Do-si-do, as simple as it may seem, has a story behind it. In fact there are as many stories and hypotheses as there are different versions of dance figures known by this name, only one of which is the clichéd back-to-back version that most people would associate with square dancing.

Here’s a story about the Coon Dog Day Square Dance Debacle.

Warning: nothing to do with dance…

Well, who’d a thunk it. An ex-partner (that’s the nice, ambiguous word that we gay folk sometimes use to denote serious relationships) has become an angler (no, not an angel…a fisher-person). I moved to Albuquerque to be with her, but stayed on when she moved on to Chicago, then back to the west coast, then on to Minneapolis, and further north to Duluth, where she seems to have become addicted to fly-fishing…and to have written a book about it: Northern Waters. With a little more googling, I even found where her daughter hangs out on the web (a Motley Fool forum, of all places), and, by dint of reading many conversations-among-people-that-I-don’t-know posts, figured out that she’s newly-engaged, and newly-graduated (maybe a medical records person? it was hard to tell). Anyway, I was intrigued to find out how much I could find out with a little bit of googling.

In fact, this whole thing started because of an article I read about Google. A quote:

The first thing a Google virgin attempts is the often humbling experience of typing one’s own name into the query line. The next search is inevitable—a Google dragnet to determine the fate of old flames.

I realized I’d never really done that, so I thought I’d try. It’s pretty amazing.

You may wonder why I have a google search field on my site…did you think it was for your convenience? Not.

I was reading a thread on Jane Austen era dancing and found this:

Well, for the Regency era the dancES vs. dancING distinction is not quite as large or universal as it appears. The supposed names of (country) dances in many cases are more likely the names of the dance tunes, with the figures being fairly interchangeable – the same tune could have many different figure combinations, and the same figure combinations turn up linked to many different tunes. Linking specific figures to specific tunes of this era is something of a modern artifact, not necessarily reflective of the historical experience. (And of course one could always just compose the figures on the spot to any tune desired – there are surviving manuals full of rules for how to do it (emphasis added). It’s quite a trip to do this with a roomful of modern dancers!) But you could be quite good at country dancING without knowing any particular country dancES.

I wonder who composed the dances on the spot? Did they have a caller, perchance?

Here’s a little bit of discussion on square dancing while discussing how to get gum off of a shirt (hubby’s gum fell out of his mouth while square dancing…). Interesting attitudes.

The Pillsbury Doughboy says ‘I love to square dance, particularly when we “Dough-si-dough.” I have to be careful, though, so I don’t stub my “dough.”‘ This interview with the Doughboy is no longer on the Pillsbury site (in fact, a search for “doughboy” gave no results; I guess he’s retired, although his picture is still there), but you can see it in the google cache. Also, although the Doughboy site is gone, you can read a review of it (including a complete copy of the interview) here.