Boy, you’d never know by looking at this plot synopsis, but this episode of “Six Feet Under,” a comedy-drama series on HBO, featured not only square dancing, but a gay square dance caller. If you go through the pictures, you’ll find this one that actually shows some dancers.

With a little more searching, I found the script, and here’s where we first see the caller, Kurt:

The slumber room is filled with old men and women, square-dancing in pairs. Their instructor is a handsome, young guy in his early-to-mid-twenties, KURT. DAVID peers into the room and sees KURT and is instantly attracted to him.

Kurt: Everybody ready? And round and left. Right. Left. Good! Good, swing your partners! And promenade home! Very good!

KURT sees DAVID and smiles flirtatiously. DAVID smiles back.

Later on, the dancers learn the Hungarian Swing:

Kurt: OK, very good! Very good, ladies and gentlemen. Now, if I could just have your attention, please, for just one second. I want to teach you a new figure for the repertoire. You’re gonna love it, your friends are gonna be very impressed, I promise. It’s called the Hungarian Swing, and I need a volunteer, (walks up to DAVID and takes his hand) so if I could just borrow you for one second. (DAVID looks nervous but slightly excited) I promise, it won’t hurt a bit. It goes like this. (He demonstrates all of the dance moves, using DAVID as his partner) You’re gonna stand right hip to right hip, your other hand is gonna go up on your partner’s waist, and your left hand is gonna go up over the head. Now, you’re gonna swing one and a half times, she will turn one and a half times (DAVID laughs as he spins), into the promenade position. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Let’s do it again, with the music. OK? (DAVID starts to walk away.) Uh, not so fast. (grabs DAVID

Notes from the weekend:

I attended Scares and Squares, Rosetown Ramblers’‘ annual fly-in, this past weekend. It was, as most dance weekends are, a lot of fun. I’ve gone to S&S for the past several years, and was originally scheduled to call at this one. However, they decided they needed to cut back a little, so they went with their two main callers, Mike DeSisto and Michael Kellogg. (Does there seem to be a plethora of callers named Mike/Michael? Last year, the Albuquerque Singles Fling did an M&M show with Mike Seastrom and Mike Bramlett. At Scares and Squares, there were GCA callers Michael McMullen and Michael Levy. Could it have something to do with microphones? Mic? Mike? Hmmm…)

So Mike and Michael are both super-high-energy callers; needless to say, we worked up a sweat, even in the somewhat chilly Portland weather.

Notes on two callers/one hall: Mike and Michael called together a lot, which is great for energy/entertainment, but not so great for a program with a variety of music and “feels”. One caller can play with mood: maybe do a mellow singing call, or use a melodic patter record. But these tend to be idiosyncratic, meaning that two callers probably won’t do the same mellow singers. So it’s harder for them to do a duet.

There are some standard singers that callers will use when they need to call together; Mike and Michael didn’t use a lot of those. They seemed to be able to find other high energy songs that they could do together…until they did an all singing call tip with both “Mountain Music” and “Tennessee River”. When the second song started to play, I almost thought they’d made a mistake and put the same record back on. I guess sometimes it “works” to use two really similar singers together; the dancers certainly enjoyed it.

Another area that’s hard with two callers/one room is doing “specialty” choreography. When you’re alternating sequences, it’s hard to develop a theme. Mike did get Michael to play with him on a “move on” tip (one of Mike’s specialties: moving dancers from one square to another, and getting them back together). Michael picked up the idea right away, and they both moved us around through the nine-square grid.

Moving in one direction (towards side walls or toward head walls) seems pretty easy; it’s sort of a chicken plucker kind of routine, with the “move on” part resembling a multi-square trade by. So one can do a “Pass Thru, Move On, Right and Left Thru, Pass Thru, Move On” and be back with intact original squares. Throw in some zeroes and equivalents (but keep it really easy; you don’t want any breakdowns). Where it gets trickier is when Mike does a bend the line after a couple of Move Ons, so that we start moving in the other direction. I’m not quite sure how all that works (and it’s hard to (a) get enough checkers and (b) move 9 squares through the various calls).

Both Mike and Michael are easy to work with (I’ve called with both and enjoyed it) and both are pros, so they made working together look easy, and they sounded great together.

On Sunday, Michael called along with some non-staff callers. Len Christiansen got to do all of the singing call records he’s produced on his BBear record label. If you haven’t check out his music, you should. He’s released “Every Second”, “She Comes Around” and “Man with the Bag” (my personal favorite), and is working on some new ones.

Nice, positive, well-researched article on square dancing: Las Vegas SUN: Partner Up: Las Vegas square dancers are one big family’. It even quotes Jerry Reed, from CALLERLAB. It talks honestly about the decline in numbers, and ties it in with a larger societal decline in community activities, even mentioning Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam.

This is a cute site for a Japanese square dance club, the Chiyoda Square Dance Club. I normally don’t like animation, but this page uses animation in a way that shows square dancing. At first, the words are synched up with the animations of the four squares, but if you let it play for a while, the dancers get ahead of the caller. Of course, we’ve never seen that before….

I googled “dancing is fun”; three out of the first five hits were square dance related (and five out of the first ten, and ten out of the first twenty…do we protest too much, or do we really have the most fun?)

Square dancing by a non-dancer: Square Dancing is FUN.

I normally don’t like animated GIFs, but these are all dancing related, and some are kind of cute: Dancing is Fun.

Here’s some more about dancing and fun.

I got here through the dancing is fun thing, but then discovered a treasure trove of easy folk dance descriptions. Unfortunately, I had a hard time following his descriptions of dances that I know, and I disagree with his description of Alunelul. This description is more like I remember.

Then there’s this: WHY DO YOU WANT TO DANCE?, which says, “Dancing may well be fun, but a lot of sins are fun.” For more info on why dancing is evil, see Christians Can’t Dance. Hmmm…I have a hard time seeing square dancing as lasciviousness and lewdness…oooh, baby, baby….

Here’s a great collection of pictures of stuff from the past–commercial things that you might remember from your youth.

So I googled square dance nostalgia and found a petticoat fetishist site: Petticoat Pond. The site came up because of a caption on one of the pictures: From the days when one didn’t have to go to a square dance to see what you saw at a square dance .

The google search took me to a site, Save Square Dancing. I can’t tell who owns it (whois on the domain name shows all the info as unavailable). It’s actually a fairly nice-looking (by my criteria: clean design, no animated graphics, no auto-music) site, although there’s not a lot of content. Google found it because of this, from its History of Square Dancing page: “Early American dancing is not a relic from a crowded attic of nostalgia, but is still a part of the recreational scene.”

I found this:

There is also a “culture” out there of square dance records on new 45’s. A square dance caller and a band take a popular song (mostly country, but on a few occasions, rock) and change some of the lyrics to things like “allemand left and once around”, “square through four”, etc. (And nearly all square dance callers nowadays SING the songs rather than just speak words.)

here.

Petticoats and vinyl records…yep, we’re a nostalgic activity.

So what is it about modern music and songs named “Square Dance”?

Here’s one by The Brodys. (“I just want to dance a little dosido, allemande left in the undergrowth”). There’s an mp3 file of the song available.

And one by Eminem: (“C’mon now, let’s all get on down, let’s do-si-do now, we gon’ have a good ol’ time/Don’t be scared, cus there ain’t nothin’ to worry ’bout, let your hair down, and square dance with me! “).

Does one need to have something to say to run a weblog? Naahhh…

Now here’s a question..should I join the Dance Blogs clique? And what’s a “clique” as opposed to a “webring”? I don’t think I belong in the Dance Blog group, since I’m more into meta-discussion about square dancing and calling, rather than “my life as a dancer”.

All of the dance blogs listed in the clique, as well as on this list of dance blogs relate to Irish dancing. Interesting.

I found a blog with a category for dance-related entries. From an article there, I learned about The Ketchup, supposedly sweeping Europe as the succesor for the Macarena.

This would be a good name for a dance blog: shut up & dance. Too bad it belongs to a writer…

While looking for weblogs involving dance, I found this very cool page: Dancing Bones

Found an out-of-date, no-longer-active weblog about the Mountain School in Vermont. The blogger wrote:

monday, april 8 1:11 PM
Ah, the weekend’s over! It was pretty great. Saturday night we had our square dance. It was a blast. I LOVE square dancing. I had such a good time! The man who came to fiddle and call the dances for us has been fiddling since the 1930’s. His wife came to play the piano. We cleared out the entire dining hall of all couches and tables. A lot of people came dressed up in bandanas and cowboy hats, which was cute. But the really awesome part was the dancing. It was so neat to be in a square with seven other people, three other couples, and to know what we were doing. We learned seven different dances, each one progressively more complicated, and more fun. My favorites were ‘chasing the squirrel’ and the ‘Virginia Reel’. After two and a half hours of dancing, the man played one last song for all of us who had stayed until the end – a polka. Cathy and Dave, two teachers, showed us how to polka. Square dancing is definitely my new favorite thing. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some places in Connecticut!

Just so you’ll know I’m not the only one with a highly-specific, highly idiosyncratic weblog, check out Mermaniac – A Show Tunes Weblog.

I just found a site that is selling a CD of Flash animations of square dance moves. There are some online samples, and they look like they could be helpful for visual learners.

I did find one error in the samples (and I didn’t look at all of them): For Chain Down the Line, they have the dancers doing it from a RH wave (even though their text says it should be done from a LH wave or a RH 2F lines).

At any rate, there are two CDs, one for MS and Plus, and another for Advanced. The animations let you play them in slow motion and step through them frame-by-frame. Each sells for $31.99 plus $5 S&H and can be ordered on line. The author is Bob Gartner.

Of course, once one starts to look, there are more. This one is of no interest to me because it’s only for Windo(ze/ws) machines. YMMV. Basic Mainstream Tutorial.

There are online animations here and here. With Noriko’s, I especially like the Graphical Image Training, which lets you look at a sequence and predict where a selected dancer will go after the next call. Also, Jim Penrod has some animations here.

Out of all the animations I saw, I thought the Flash ones were the best (despite the error). I couldn’t check out the PC-only one. The GIFs were not as smooth or controllable as the Flash animations. Vic Ceder has done a few JavaScript animations that look promising.