On the Road Again...

Tonight's going to be interesting. It's a 'smooth honky-tonk' night at Mike's Dance Barn. No Terry Lee tearing the place up - instead it'll be the house band and in a way they'll be playing me off the stage for a three-week hiatus. Business is taking me to the far-flung shores of Fremont, CA and Middletown, VA. In the span of three weeks I'll cross the country with only a brief stint at my Indiana Home between. I like traveling (especially when I can work in a visit to a great dance venue) but the first half of my travels promises to be way more business than trip. Maybe I'll get in a little surveying in Fremont, you never know.

During the second half, though, I'll be visiting a few venues in VA. One interesting fact about the town I'm staying in while in Virginia is that it's the birthplace of Patsy Cline. I guess that's a link between tonight's dance at Mike's Dance Barn and my traveling. Huh, synchronicity?

Jim and Jacks, Down by the River...

Last weekend we took a little trip to Cincinnati. It's about a two hour drive from our house to Cincinnati, so the city makes a nice jaunt on a weekend when nothing else is planned or when there's some dance event that warrants our attention. This time around it was a visit to Jack and Jim's on the River, a little bar appropriately located, on the Ohio River.

The evening started inauspiciously. Being from Indianapolis, a city known for its absence of geographic features, I forget that some places actually have hills and rivers and other things that generally make navigation - well - a pain in the butt. We ran into this with Jack and Jim's. As I said before, it's located on the river and that means no straight streets. It's also under about six dozen railroad bridges, which means it looks a little more like a weigh station than a bar with a dance floor. But, after some swearing, insane driving, and putting the GPS feature of my cell phone to the ultimate test, we found the place and all was happy.

There's something about dancing at a bar that you don't get when you go to an actual ballroom. It's called liquor. Ah liquor, that wonderful social lubricant and synaptic anesthetic. A little bit of trivia for those of you who aren't so much into the whole bar scene: people will get drunk and when they do, they think they're even better dancers. Oh, by the way, they're wrong - oh so wrong.

I know I'm no good at things like the foxtrot. Apparently, though, if you poured a few shots of bourbon into me I'd become convinced not only that I'm qualified to foxtrot but I'm probably of the caliber that I could give the dolts on Dancing With The Stars a run for their money. I never saw so many people who were unable to keep their place on the dance floor while doing a slot dance. The swing, regardless of coast, is a stationary dance. You may turn around in a circle, you may move up and back, but you're staying generally in the same spot on the floor.

Not this crowd. Maybe the floor was sloped or maybe there was a wind blowing through the bar that I didn't detect. Whatever the case Kell and I kept moving out of the way until we finally gave up and decided we'd hold our ground regardless of who we had to step on. Hey, part of dancing is defending your turf I guess. At least it is when you're dancing in a bar.

Another thing revolves around my last post. Remember the dance floor map I posted? Take a look, I'll wait. You back? Good. So, you know that center part where you're supposed to do slot dances and line dances? Well, reading through the article and keeping in mind the whole subject of etiquette, what do you think you should do if the floor too small to really allow for social and line dancing? Hmm - well, I'd imagine that you'd refrain from lining up seventeen abreast and hogging the whole floor. It's a novel concept, I know, but one that's apparently far less understood than you might believe. The floor was small and crowded but people still lined up to do the stompy dance.

We wound up leaving around eleven thirty. It was a good time - but I think Kelly would agree we've had better. Is Jim and Jack's worth visiting? Well, if you're in Cincinnati and you don't have plans, yes. If you're looking for a destination to dance - I'd give it a pass.

Do They Swing in Utah?

It’s nice when you can travel for work – well, when you can travel for work sometimes, not in a Willy Lowman kind of way. Tomorrow I’m heading for Salt Lake City for a two day training course and since the course is on Thursday and Friday I decided to extend my stay by a day so that Kelly and I could have a Friday and Saturday in Utah. As luck would have it, we’re staying close to the Murray Art Center and the art center has Friday and Saturday night dancing!

So, after answering the question ‘Do They Swing in Iowa’, now we’re off to answer the same question about Utah. I’ll be sure to let you know when we return!

Hawkeye Swing Fest - In Repose

Today you get on I74 West, you set the cruise control, you check the Garmin to make sure you’ve got the right course plotted, and in nearly six hours you’re pulling into Iowa City (barring unforeseen delays like road construction). It’s the marvel of the modern age – the country united through ribbons of asphalt and concrete, you can be anywhere in the US with a car and enough time. The problem is, an interstate highway is a little like a vampire in a blood bank – sooner or later all the color’s drained out of the place.

You may have gathered that the trip to Iowa City was – uneventful. Mile after mile of flat, Indiana farmland giving way to mile after mile of flat Illinois farmland that eventually gave way to mile after mile of (drum roll) flat Iowa farmland. The only difference between the three states is that somehow the farms in Iowa seemed lonelier than the farms in Illinois or Indiana. Either that or I was starting to get the bends from being vacuum sealed in a car for too long. The big break in the – action – was when we crossed the Mississippi River. The Mighty Muddy was living up to its moniker, swollen with floodwaters from the weeks of rain that have plagued the Midwest; the Mississippi was pushing its banks and churning southward toward the Gulf. I wondered if it was an omen, if our adventure would be fraught with trouble and beset with foreboding…then again maybe it was those car bends again.

If you ever have business on The University of Iowa campus let me recommend staying at the downtown Sheraton. There’s something about a hotel that serves cookies – well, at least for me there is. Our room and base of operations was decent, comfortable, and affordable…and did I mention there were cookies in the lobby? We prepped ourselves, changed out of our road-grimed clothing, and hitched a ride with the courtesy van to the IMU, the sight of the Friday night dance.

The IMU second floor ballroom (gee what a romantic name) was decorated in what I can only describe as mid-60’s government drab. Nice hardwood floor surrounded by some of the worse nondescript nothingness I’ve seen since high school. The problem with a venue like this is it isn’t maintained by people who dance – it’s maintained by people who give lectures and hold fund raisers. It’s maintained by Dean Vernon Wormer. After less than an hour the dance floor could be neatly divided into two zones – the too slick to dance half and the too sticky from spilled junk half.

The floor’s condition wasn’t helped much by the band. They were okay but no Tommy Dorsey – a guitar driven, Chocolat-inspired group they had some tempo problems and never did quite burn the place down. Still the evening was fun and I will compliment the crowd on their floor manners. But I shouldn’t make it sound like I didn’t have a good time - there were a lot of good dancers and none of them seemed to think they needed two thirds of the hardwood to do their thing. I’ve been to dances here in Indy with fewer people and a lot more collisions – so kudos to the swingers in Iowa.

Saturday morning came early even though our first class didn’t roll around until after 9 AM. Lindy Fundamentals was just that – the fundamentals. The fundamental thing I learned from this class was that there are a lot of ways to do the Lindy Hop and no one of them is the only ‘right’ way. And that lesson wasn’t in the curriculum. The great thing was that we got two turns from this one session – an outside and an inside turn that complement each other.

The second Saturday session focused on Jitterbug – we’d been looking forward to this class for a long time because we’ve been looking for something different to do with an EC Single Swing and some of the off-tempo EC Triple Swings. From the description given on the Hawkeye Swing website we thought we were going to get a six-count Lindy hop…what we got was the standard EC Triple Swing with less swing in the sidesteps. It was a disappointment – but at least we did learn a fun triple swing trick we’re calling the butt bump.

Lead-Follow technique was revealing – but not mind-blowing. Yes, we learned the importance of stance and frame, we learned about communicating with our partners, what we didn’t learn was anything new. Maybe it’s because we’ve had Lindy lessons for some time or we were a little beyond what was taught in the class. Whatever the case the session was a bit bland in spite of the fun that the instructor tried to ladle on top of the material.

The real wash out for Saturday, though, was the Jazz Solo class. I have to respect the folks who put together a routine – a bunch of coordinated moves and tricks that look super together. Hey, every great Lindy Hop dance combo around did it. See, the problem comes when you spend three quarters of a day talking about how a dance is ‘social’ and meant to be performed with various and different partners – then you try to teach a routine that can only be done by two partners who have spent time together developing and learning the a routine. The theory and the practice aren’t matching up, Jackson. Not only that, if you dance in the places we do there is no room to hotdog on the dance floor. The first time you Susie Q’d across the hardwood you’d wind up needing a tour guide to find your partner again. We walked three-quarters of the way through the session because it was plain pointless.

Saturday’s dance was better than Friday’s. The band was hot and the room was packed. We danced ‘till 11 o’clock and then headed back to our room to recuperate and prepare for another day of lessons and a long ride home.

Sunday morning started with Charleston Basics. It was a good session, really – we had experience with the Charleston kick as a part of the Lindy Hop but never by itself. It was interesting to do the dance that got George Bailey a wife in It’s a Wonderful Life. I’m not sure how many Charlestons we’ll run into but at least now we can do a decent skip up and kick-walk.

The next session was Lindy Hop Moves. The concept was great – the problem for me was the format and that bears mentioning for anyone who’s thinking about traveling to something like the Hawkeye Swing Festival. Group classes are just that – for a group. They don’t cater to different learning speeds and if you miss something you’ve just missed it. We learned the Texas Tommy, the Reverse Swing-Out, and something we’re calling The Cape because I have no idea what the real name is – but it took lassoing the instructor after class to nail some of the details down.

So, all in all I’d rate the Hawkeye a solid ‘B’. We learned a ton – but sometimes it wasn’t a fun process. The whole thing had a bit too much of the rah-rah cheerleader camp atmosphere. Maybe I should get some spirit, maybe I should remember that this dance thing’s for fun, I guess I just don’t need to be told that in a group session…if I did I’d get therapy with Toni Basil.