Tired but happy
Jan. 22nd, 2006 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Yesterday was a long and exhausting day, but in a good way.
A couple of times a year our local gender-role-free contra dance has an "advanced" dance (i.e., one geared specifically toward experienced dancers) in the afternoon preceding our regular all-comers Saturday evening dance, and yesterday was such an occasion. And a rather special one at that, given that the callers for the two dances were the twin goddesses of contra dancing, Lisa Greenleaf (afternoon) and Linda Leslie (evening).
I always look forward to the advanced dances. I do enjoy dancing with beginners, and helping them turn into experienced dancers. but once in a while it's nice to have a session where you know that the caller can and will call just about anything and everybody on the floor will know what to do (or even if they don't, that they'll sort it out somehow). And Lisa always throws in a couple of interesting square dances. Now, I don't pretend to be a real square dancer in the sense understood by folks like
otterpop58 and
bjarvis, and I know some contra dancers don't like squares, and some square dancers don't like squares done by contra-dancers, but I never miss a Lisa Greenleaf square if I'm in the same room; they're invariably challenging and fun, and even if it isn't until the last iteration that everybody actually gets everything right, you know that a good time will have been had by all.
Linda Leslie always calls lovely dances, too, and she's really good at helping new dancers; she also frequently modifies the dance the last time through so that it ends with a partner swing, which I think is really nice. Altogether a lovely pair of dances sessions.
We had good-sized crowds for both dances (although the advanced dancers were kind of slow to arrive -- Lisa started us out with a three-couple dance and a "square" dance for six couples because that's how many dancers were available); this was our third evening dance in a row with healthy-sized crowds and a fair number of newcomers, which is encouraging. (It would be nice to have a few more second- and third-time dancers, but we did have at least one, anyway.)
Since I was "on duty" for the afternoon dance,
jwg and I had to arrive at 1:00 so we could haul the sound system and all the other supplies up from the basement, so by 10:00 or so we were getting pretty tired (in fact I remember noticing the time and thinking "is it really only 10:00? It feels much later"). We hung on for a while longer, but, quite uncharacteristically for us, decided to skip the last dance and go home a few minutes early, more especially since
jwg had to get up relatively early (for us) in order to go to an LCFD board meeting 100 miles from here. We got home at about 11:30 and just fell into bed.
I'm taking it easy today.
A couple of times a year our local gender-role-free contra dance has an "advanced" dance (i.e., one geared specifically toward experienced dancers) in the afternoon preceding our regular all-comers Saturday evening dance, and yesterday was such an occasion. And a rather special one at that, given that the callers for the two dances were the twin goddesses of contra dancing, Lisa Greenleaf (afternoon) and Linda Leslie (evening).
I always look forward to the advanced dances. I do enjoy dancing with beginners, and helping them turn into experienced dancers. but once in a while it's nice to have a session where you know that the caller can and will call just about anything and everybody on the floor will know what to do (or even if they don't, that they'll sort it out somehow). And Lisa always throws in a couple of interesting square dances. Now, I don't pretend to be a real square dancer in the sense understood by folks like
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Linda Leslie always calls lovely dances, too, and she's really good at helping new dancers; she also frequently modifies the dance the last time through so that it ends with a partner swing, which I think is really nice. Altogether a lovely pair of dances sessions.
We had good-sized crowds for both dances (although the advanced dancers were kind of slow to arrive -- Lisa started us out with a three-couple dance and a "square" dance for six couples because that's how many dancers were available); this was our third evening dance in a row with healthy-sized crowds and a fair number of newcomers, which is encouraging. (It would be nice to have a few more second- and third-time dancers, but we did have at least one, anyway.)
Since I was "on duty" for the afternoon dance,
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I'm taking it easy today.