Wow, this Live Journal thing is interesting…all the different attitudes towards square dancing.

First, I’m getting journal entries that mention contra dancing as well as square dancing. The contra dance entries are all pretty matter of fact…things like “I’m going to a contra dance tonight” or “We went to a contra dance last night and had fun”. The square dance entries, on the other hand, are all over the map. A few Live Journalers are square dancers or are adults learning to square dance. Their entries are also pretty matter of fact.

But the adolescents…contra dancing isn’t on their map, but square dancing is foisted on them in middle school. Evensven waxes philosophical:

I’ve rediscovered one of the great mysteries of the world.

Why do they teach square dancing in middle school?

What mysterious forces decided that thirteen is the best time to learn the Virginia Reel? Is it an old man, deep in the darkest depths of the Education Department, making sure year after year- decade after decade- square dancing is enshrined in the cirriculum? Or is it something in the air that causes mini mass hysteria among PE teachers? Or perhaps there is something essential about square danceing. Some actul good reason for why this seemingly worthless skill gets a week out dedicated to it. Maybe square dancing by people likely to be virgins is the only way to maintain our planets lifeforce. Nobody knows.

And yet it goes on. And it will probably keep going on. One hundred years from now, our great great grandkids will likely line up boy-girl in damp gymnasiums, as ancient records play songs that have been forgotten everywhere but there. And they will dance, for reasons unknown to any human.

But xsuicidexdreamx likes it enough to remember the calls:

Gym we did SQUARE DANCING hahaha I love it… “Now we all join hands and we circle the ring. Then you stop where you are and give your hunny a swing. Swing that lil’ gal behind you. Then ____ swing your own_____. Then it’s alemand left with the corner gal. Dosie do your own. Now we all promenade with the sweet corner maid, singing “Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Ohhhhh”.” So fun. Rina and I had the song stuck in our head before Myhrer even played it. Sounds rather erotic.

And then there was this post from shinrin, an exchange student in Nagasaki, that just made me grin all day. Read the whole post; this is just an excerpt:

We discovered that there was dancing…dancing…dancing! In Nagasaki! Tomorrow (aka today, since this happened last night). So guess what I was doing this morning?????!!!!????

I was square dancing! Square dancing! Square dancing in Japan (althought that isn’t that surprising since they do square dance in Tokyo), but I was square dancing in Nagasaki! The place were I had searched and searched and not found any square dancing. Do you see me grinning? Do you see the smile that has been on my face all morning? (with a brief pause b/c of frustration at the computers because I wanted to write all my favorite people and tell them the wonderful news but couldn’t). But really, I think my face muscles are getting sore they’ve been smiling so much today. And I’m sure all the people on the sidewalk were thinking, “there’s something wrong with that girl” as they saw me walk down the sidewalk, dazzled by the fact I had gotten to square dance for the first time in five months. It was so, so wonderful!

It was a beginners class (so it does appear I will actually go through a beginners class–only fair since at home I kind of just jumped into where my family was whenever I was home and have had only maybe four beginner beginner lessons), and there were 3 guys to maybe 25 women (and one guy was the caller), but it was soooooooooo wonderful. Such fun. I kept wanting to twiddle, but held back for the most part (see, I can be good ;-)) but the caller did catch me doing some stuff I shouldn’t have known and after one of the dances goes, “I can see she’s done this before.” (They were having fun with me, you can tell they don’t get many exchange students.) Lol..and they had the fastest lines of communication I’ve ever seen. One person on one side of the room would ask me something (like where I lived or how long I’d been in Japan) and a second later I’d run into someone who had been all the way on the other side of the room and they’d say something like, “So I hear you live in…, etc.” There must have been some telepathy going on, because I have never, (and I mean never), never seen information travel that fast before.