Here are some pictures from the New Mexico State Square and Round Dance Festival in Ruidoso. I don’t think I’m visible in any of them. There’s a great picture of my friend Kathi playing a ‘lady of the night” in one of the after-party skits.

I gotta say that I think afterparties are very strange. I haven’t been to that many; after the first one (where they did “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”), I avoided them, until I happened into another (where they did “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”). And guess what! In Ruidoso, they did “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”…I wonder if it’s an unstated requirement that all afterparties must feature “There’s a Hole in the Bucket”.

I also often find afterparty skits offensive, and Ruidoso did its part by doing some lip synch number involving a gay football player (can we say “stereotype”?).

I did a web search on square dancing afterparties, and came across an online diary by a square dancer. Here are a couple of quotes on afterparties. The first is from July 2000:

The afterparty participants had a lot of fun presenting the skits, which is always fun to see, but the skits were silly, silly, silly. It made the afterparty that our club put on after our anniversary dance seem like Shakespeare. (Okay, perhaps that’s an exaggeration.) The best part about the afterparty is that the President’s hubby bought us ice cream.

This is from February 2000:

After Party A few members of our square dance club met to plan the 30th anniversary dance for the club. At the meeting, some of the older members were trying to explain the concept of an after party. Apparently, it’s a show that’s put on by a club after a dance. The show is composed of club members acting in skits or lip-synching songs. Some of us newer members were kind of dubious–okay, I was dubious–about whether people would really be interested in this kind of thing. The older members of the club, however, reminisced about after parties they had attended, assuring us that after parties could be big hits, marking a club as a fun one.

I’m discovering that square dancing has a culture all of its own