Death in the Family, Part 2

This morning, we learned my cousin Josh died from a cerebral hemorrhage. By all appearances, he died quietly in his sleep, no obvious trauma or suffering. In the greater scheme of life, I suppose it would be nice if all of us could pass away so peacefully, but at only 22, his life had hardly even started. At such a young adult age, he was only just starting to learn of the possibilities of life and that potential is now gone.

Later this afternoon, we learned the viewings & visitation will be on Thursday & Friday of the upcoming week. I can't stay in the area that long: I must be back in DC for Thursday evening. Still, I'll have some time in the next few days to spend with Josh's mother (my aunt) and our mutual grandmother and make myself available where & if needed.

This Week in Square Dancing

I have hardly danced a single step this past week but it's been a very productive & interesting week nonetheless.

I called a C2 workshop last Wednesday for our small regular group. In all, it went pretty well: I have three sequences I want to retool to varying degrees, but the other 50+ used that night were fine, including some with cute gimmicks or tricks.

kent4str and I have received our GCA guest calling assignments for the Vancouver IAGSDC convention at the end of this month. I have an Advanced set, a C1 set and two C2 sets; Kent has a C1 and two C2 sets. Woo hoo!

Last weekend's DC Pride square dance demo & parade went better than last year but could be better. The DC Lambda Squares board agrees and it appears we're finally going to start working seriously on creating an official square dance demo team for public appearances & performances.

We're sketchy on the details at the moment --I've been derailed by a death in the extended family and both kent4str and I had commitments to this weekend's Baltimore Pride and the Chesapeake Squares-- but we do have some ideas.

1. It's an invitation-only team. I know this will hurt some feelings but we need to know that those participating can dance effectively, are flexible enough to dance the boy or girl part if needed and are committed to the rehearsals and performance schedule.
   
2. We've created a tentative list of approximately 20 dancers, past & present DCLS members, we plan to approach. Ideally, we want enough dancers for two full squares, plus a few extras for those who need to beg off a particular gig because of illness, work or whatever.
   
3. We'll be dancing to a script so anyone with Plus experience will have enough dance knowledge; we'll do more than just the MS & Plus list of course, but we're just teaching the calls instead of teaching how to dance.
   
4. We're covering a lot more than dancing. We're going to emphasize a complete performance: how to get on stage, how to exit the stage, how to hold one's inactive hands, how we're going to dress, etc., and enforce consistent flourishes & styling. I frequently joke while calling at club nights that it's square dancing, not ballet, so mistakes & imperfections are a cause for laughter rather than embarrassment. Not for the performance team: this is ballet now.

Beyond that, we haven't planned much. Above all else, we need to set a rehearsal time and location and that's no small matter with so many dance events around the greater DC area on any given night. At the moment, I don't even have a clue where to begin on that topic. We also need to do a boatload of research to learn as quickly as possible what will & will not work. Time to dig into the CALLERLAB archives...

In other news, DC Lambda Squares has a great new badge design. The order for new club badges will be submitted Monday and I hope we can show them off at the IAGSDC convention in Vancouver. I really like the design.

And in still other news, DCLS has moved from our dingy, carpeted Scott Hall at National City Christian Church to the music room a few doors over. The room has vastly better lighting, is enormously cleaner --Scott Hall is a charter school during the daytimes and kids are by definition somewhat messy-- and has a tile floor. The acoustics are a little echoey so we'll need to experiment with speaker placement for optimal results but it's better than the audio black hole in Scott Hall. Bill Harrison was the first of our regular callers to use the new hall for Advanced & Challenge night last Thursday with good results; I'm calling for DCLS next Thursday so I'll have more to report after that.

DCLS scooped up 90 names at last weekend's pride festival. The wrist bands and temporary tatoos with the DCLS logo seemed to be a draw, but I think the big win was our raffle of a Kindle. We have a pizza night & open house on Monday so we'll see how many folks come for that. kent4str and I are co-teaching the new Mainstream class (16 weeks starting on Monday, July 9) so we'll hopefully convert some of these names into new dancers soon.

Today's Baltimore Pride parade with the Chesapeake Squares went vastly better than last year's. Last year, we attempted a quick demo in front of the reviewing stand but the audio guys screwed up our pre-recorded music & calling, starting the sequence four calls in and thus losing all of our dancers. It was a mess.

This year, we gave them the music but were relying on our own audio system for the calls. It worked better, but for some reason, someone insisted the dancers dance in front of our float rather than behind so we had to quickly swivel our speakers around so face the dancers. Then the MC from the stage insisted on talking over top the calling & dancing so our dancers could hardly hear kent4str. Fortunately, I could pick out his voice and interpret his calls and re-shout them to our square so we had a pretty successful 30 second demo despite the circumstances. Oh, and the audio guy never stated our music at all. Not a single note. *sigh*

Chesapeake Squares has an open house on Tuesday, June 26, 8-10pm. As I type this, I just discovered to my horror that I'm scheduled to call for them that night. Doh! :-) They're also sponsoring a Kindle raffle for tomorrow's Baltimore Pride Festival... let's hope they get as many names as DCLS did, and that we can translate those names into new dancers!

Vote or Die

Internet service provider GoDaddy is holding a public vote to select the spokesperson for their promotions and home page, either Danica Patrick or James Hinchcliffe.

Please go immediately and vote for Hinchcliffe. Why? Because this what he looks like:


Yes, I'm being shallow --quelle surprise-- but if I have to do business with GoDaddy, I'd rather have his smiling face looking up at me than hers.

The link is: http://videos.godaddy.com/vote/race-for-the-homepage.aspx?ci=55110

Vote now.