Baltimore Club Night
Oct. 26th, 2005 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bjarvisI was largely psyched up for calling in Baltimore last night, but unbeknownst to me, the evening was already sabotaged last Sunday afternoon.
We had gone to the trailer this weekend to relax and winterize the thing, closing it until next May. We knew the weather would be unpleasant to horrible so I had brought along the square dance laptop to work on polishing some existing A2 material and compose some fresh figures for this coming calling session, as well as continue transcribing various recordings and generally updating my notes. It appears that when we left Roseland on Sunday, we left the laptop behind.
At 5:30 PM Tuesday, I had the Hilton, speakers, speaker stand, cables and such ready to be packed into the minivan but could not find the laptop anywhere. Everyone searched the house top to bottom, coming up with nothing. The last place we remembered seeing it was at the trailer so we presumed that it, along with our microphones were still in West Virginia. Oops.
Fortunately, we had a spare mic, a rather older & crappy one but it works and is better than nothing. We grabbed the containers of vinyl records and headed to Baltimore.
Overall, our calling was fine last night. Folks did comment that our laptop was notable by its absence and that we were manually resetting the music on the 45s; we called jointly on the closing number (class-level MS) so we had to pass the single microphone back & forth between us. I suppose it was a useful exercise in dealing with sudden changes, but while I can accommodate chaos quickly on the fly, in general I hate surprises and dislike having to admit so publicly that I screwed up handling of my own calling equipment.
We're calling again on Saturday, the last instructional session of the current MS class. Using the vinyl and single mic will have less impact, but I'm thinking seriously of quickly installing the software and minimal MP3s on one of my other machines as an interim measure, keeping the 45s handy as a back-up.
On the good side, I did feel somewhat vindicated in my A2 calling. My first A2 tip of the night seemed to crash & burn more often than not: a few people seemed to be wandering around aimlessly but I could not determine what about the call, the sequence, my delivery or their dancing that was at fault. At that moment, I wrote it off as being me. Later in the evening, I had announced a Plus tip but all of the dancers who came on the floor were able to do A2 so they leapt at the chance for a second A2 tip when offered. This time, everything seemed to flow much better using different material. For a lark, I pulled out two figures from the prior A2 tip which had crashed badly and suddenly both flowed smoothly. I don't think I did anything particularly different (Kent concurred), but the second square was missing one somewhat weak dancer and a second weak dancer was surrounded by very strong C1/C2 dancers. My working hypothesis at the moment is that the first square was doomed by having two weak dancers interacting frequently, dragging down the square with them. I wish I had a video recording of the evening to confirm this.
Anyway, the night overall went fairly well and I believe we had enough floor time at class-level MS, Plus and A2 to keep the regulars happy.
Now to find some means of getting our laptop back from West Virginia without driving 5 hours...
We had gone to the trailer this weekend to relax and winterize the thing, closing it until next May. We knew the weather would be unpleasant to horrible so I had brought along the square dance laptop to work on polishing some existing A2 material and compose some fresh figures for this coming calling session, as well as continue transcribing various recordings and generally updating my notes. It appears that when we left Roseland on Sunday, we left the laptop behind.
At 5:30 PM Tuesday, I had the Hilton, speakers, speaker stand, cables and such ready to be packed into the minivan but could not find the laptop anywhere. Everyone searched the house top to bottom, coming up with nothing. The last place we remembered seeing it was at the trailer so we presumed that it, along with our microphones were still in West Virginia. Oops.
Fortunately, we had a spare mic, a rather older & crappy one but it works and is better than nothing. We grabbed the containers of vinyl records and headed to Baltimore.
Overall, our calling was fine last night. Folks did comment that our laptop was notable by its absence and that we were manually resetting the music on the 45s; we called jointly on the closing number (class-level MS) so we had to pass the single microphone back & forth between us. I suppose it was a useful exercise in dealing with sudden changes, but while I can accommodate chaos quickly on the fly, in general I hate surprises and dislike having to admit so publicly that I screwed up handling of my own calling equipment.
We're calling again on Saturday, the last instructional session of the current MS class. Using the vinyl and single mic will have less impact, but I'm thinking seriously of quickly installing the software and minimal MP3s on one of my other machines as an interim measure, keeping the 45s handy as a back-up.
On the good side, I did feel somewhat vindicated in my A2 calling. My first A2 tip of the night seemed to crash & burn more often than not: a few people seemed to be wandering around aimlessly but I could not determine what about the call, the sequence, my delivery or their dancing that was at fault. At that moment, I wrote it off as being me. Later in the evening, I had announced a Plus tip but all of the dancers who came on the floor were able to do A2 so they leapt at the chance for a second A2 tip when offered. This time, everything seemed to flow much better using different material. For a lark, I pulled out two figures from the prior A2 tip which had crashed badly and suddenly both flowed smoothly. I don't think I did anything particularly different (Kent concurred), but the second square was missing one somewhat weak dancer and a second weak dancer was surrounded by very strong C1/C2 dancers. My working hypothesis at the moment is that the first square was doomed by having two weak dancers interacting frequently, dragging down the square with them. I wish I had a video recording of the evening to confirm this.
Anyway, the night overall went fairly well and I believe we had enough floor time at class-level MS, Plus and A2 to keep the regulars happy.
Now to find some means of getting our laptop back from West Virginia without driving 5 hours...
