The Irvington Lodge

Washington Street. I think every city has a Washington Street. Something about the founding father’s name and a place becoming ‘someplace’ go together. So villages become towns, towns acquire mayors and councils, and streets stop being “the road that runs past the Miller place”. Inevitably, they get named after presidents or trees. Business flourishes and with that fraternal orders and organizations are founded. These organizations fulfill basic needs: Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, and a hundred others have come and gone through the centuries – all of them geared toward serving the working man, providing benefits and gathering places and cementing the people of the town together.


Time passes. A hundred years of expansion and contraction, social upheaval, America re-inventing itself with cement and steel. Towns that had been isolated entities grow and merge, becoming cities. The growth obliterates the past, old buildings are cleared away for modern life. But some markers of the past remain.

On Wednesday we went to the east side of Indianapolis to visit Irvington. Irvington Lodge Number 666 (can’t make that up!) used to be (and may still be, I was unable to find information on the web about the lodge) the home of the Masons. We attended the Indianapolis Senior’s Center Spring Fling, a small dance intended for senior citizens. Kelly’s parents are members of the center and occasionally we attend one of their dances.

When I go to one of these dances I’m always impressed by the men and women there. Not because they’re all incredible dancers or that they’re doing any fancy moves, but because they’re out there dancing when all of society says they ought to be stored away somewhere. One fellow there was 94 years old – in fact it was his birthday – and he’s at a dance. I hope at 94 I’m dancing whether it’s swinging or shuffling.

The dance took place on the second floor. The hall was a lovely. At 6:30 the late afternoon sun was slanting in through the tall windows, casting bright rectangles on the oak floor. The arts and crafts décor is simple and elegant, not ostentatious or overblown like many Masonic lodges. We sat in folding chairs along the wall, the same way it would have been done a hundred years ago. As I’m prone to do I started wondering about how many people had sat in that same place and what they might have been thinking. Maybe one late spring afternoon, while the sun slanted in through the windows.

BUNNY!

Being caught between Valentine's Day and Easter and in the middle of the seemingly endless gray skies that are common to my part of the Midwest during this season, I found an appropriate piece of sheet music.

I can't help thinking that the Bunny Hug must have been a dance - especially with it being "The Craze of the Day". Personally, I can't help thinking it sounds like a euphemism for sex, "They went down to Lover's Lane and he gave her the old bunny hug..." Afterward there would be tittering and murmured innuendos. Google turned up a Wikipedia article but the abundance of 'citation needed' statements (along with the fact it's Wikipedia) drum up suspicion about all the claims contained there – though it is notable that much of the same information is contained on StreetSwing.com. The StreetSwing article contains a quote from a 1938 issue of Stage Magazine that I like (because it shows the sentiment of the times).

"We hear the Two-step and an outrageously indecent display called the Bunny Hug are gaining favor with the younger element. Let them watch their steps, these young sensationalists. The time will come when they will tire of this eternal jogging and jerking, and find more surcease in the grace and restful beauty of the Valse".

The "valse", by the way, is a mid-nineteenth century term for the waltz. That might say a lot about the people who shared the opinion that the Bunny Hop and its anthropomorphic brethren were a sure sign of Satan's cloven hoof stepping onto the dance floor. The thing that springs to mind for me is – jeesh, it was 1938 and people were trying to use the language of 1838 to describe moral imperatives? To have actually danced the 'valse' when it was called the 'valse' and have had any reasonable understanding of the dance beyond it being 'what mommy and daddy do on Saturday night', the guy who wrote that criticisim would have been about 120 years old! Talk about not letting it go! Imagine the state of the world if we ran around applying the morals of 1910 to all our dealings. All I can say is get the stick out of your butt, it's obviously causing some irritation!

The cover's simple enough – Mr. And Mrs. Bunny dancing away in front of the mindless bunny legions. I believe they're dancing somewhere in limbo or a fog bank because they seem to be surrounded by limitless, gray nothingness. The lines are nice and clean and the image is generally pleasing if a little uninspired. It fit the season so I had to cart it out!

Save a Dancehall

Today I had another reminder just how lucky I am to have a place like the Indiana Roof Ballroom to dance. I’m a fairly religious NPR listener and one of my favorite shows is Morning Edition. Happenstance would have it that this morning, while driving to work, I caught a story on an organization that’s trying to rescue the historic dance halls of Texas. The story was a beautiful thing – a man with money saw Sengelman Hall, a Schulenburg, TX and he saw more than a moldering building that’d been sitting more or less vacant since the 40’s. He saw a piece of the soul of the town dying and he started resuscitation. Now, after two years of hard work a nearly 100 year old dance floor is feeling the feet of new generations.


Maybe I’m a member of some weird religion or maybe I just go in for anthropomorphizing but I’m certain that a building has a soul. That soul is a composite of all the people who’ve been there and all their experiences they’ve had while there. So an IRS or Dentist’s office probably are karmic black holes – filled the pain and fear. Maybe some part of the heebie-jeebies you get when you go to the DMV is because of the yuck that’s been poured into the woodwork.

What about a dancehall? Imagine a immigrant from Germany who comes to America in the 1800’s, leaving everything he knows behind in search of a better life and more opportunity. He takes the only job he can get – it’s low paying and back breaking – and after putting in another week of hard labor he finds himself on Main Street of the little town that’s his new home. He’s strolling down the street, even the signs are in a language he barely speaks – and then he hears the sound of a polka band. He follows the sound until it leads him to a brightly lit marquee and after paying the entry fee he’s immersed in the music he remembers from the old country and surrounded by other people who speak his language and for a moment he’s not an outsider and life is easier. Multiply that by a four or five hundred people and sixty or seventy years and envision the joy that might soak into the walls of an old dancehall.

I advocate dancing for the enjoyment of dancing. That’s the only reason to dance – for fun. But, if you need another reason to dance, saving your local dancehall is a pretty darn good one.

Casa Loma, Haloween 2009

Four days until Halloween and our departure for St. Louis, MO and the Casa Loma Ballroom. It's been a year since our last trip and I'm anxious to hit St. Louis' hallowed hardwood again. The thought brings me back to imagining all the dancers who've preceded me and all the nights they spent at the Casa Loma. My mind jumps back to 1927 when the ballroom first opened. The first band playing the Loma was The Bobby Greer Orchestra directed by Ernie Harzy with vocalist Miss Lee Hale. I did a brief Google and it appears the years have nearly erased all evidence of the Greer Orchestra. I'll try to look more, but there's something appealing about the mystery remaining. Maybe the Greer Orchestra was just one of a thousand bands playing one of a thousand venues back in '27. The market was riding high, thoughts of another world war were far away, and on a Saturday in September the musicians warmed up and set the place in motion. Love was found, lost, remembered, forgotten, and dreamed of that evening – and eighty two years later not a soul survives to tell the tale. Nobody can tell you if the dance floor still had the stickiness of fresh wax on sueded shoe souls. Nobody can tell you if the bathrooms smelled like fresh paint. Nobody can even say if the band was on key. All those memories and moments, the ephemera that make up life, have vanished into the ether.

I'll try to remember the past when I get out on the Loma's storied floor. I'll try to be just reverent enough – to appreciate, in spite of all the little irritations that often come with any dance, just how special it is to be able to share a dance floor with over eight decades of history. I'll try to show good courtesy to the ghosts of dancers past and to love the place as they might have when they were young and hopeful. I think the best way to honor all those people who've danced before me would be to do as they did: put on my shoes, take my best girl's hand, and dance until fatigue and time compel us to depart into the chill of an October night.

Here's to you, Greer Orchestra. Time may have forgotten the tune and tempo but the beat goes on in a hundred thousand hearts.

Moosing About

Moosing Around

Originally I thought I'd write about last weekend's experience with the Heartland Dancers but I found myself torn. As I started to put pixels to virtual paper I kept thinking I either needed to heed the sage motherly advice of 'if you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all' or I'd need to apply a Dragnet-style disclaimer at the beginning of the post saying "the names of those involved in this story have been changed to protect their identity". While I debated this, my dear Kelly got to the keyboard first and put everything down, naming names and the whole shebang. So there I was with a partially written blog post and all the air let out of my scoop. What's a sharp-tongued fellow to do?

Well, in the absence of a target for my razor wit, I thought I'd pen something about our recent re-visit to the Shadeland Moose Lodge. You'll remember we attended the Indy Dancer's luau at the Moose and it was a bit of a wash in spite of being fun. No good for the knees dancing on concrete regardless of what kind of shoes you're wearing. This week we returned to the scene of the Hawaii 5-0 crime only we saw the inside of the Moose Lodge.

You know, until yesterday I'd never seen the inside of any sort of lodge. I didn't know what to expect - I mean there aren't any really good depictions of lodge life in the media (at least any of the media outlets I frequent), so the whole thing was a big mystery to me. I found myself coming off with visions of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in their Loyal Order of Buffalo hats and I wondered if the dance session would be emceed by some kind of poobah (grand or otherwise). Truth isn't quite as strange as fiction.

The inside of the Moose Lodge looked a lot like the inside of just about any other public building though with more patriotic symbology scattered about. There were flags and mentions of 'our men and women in uniform' on bulletin boards, there were photos of club events, and there were trophies - generally the makings of just about any sort of social organization you can imagine. In the back of the building was a bar and full dining room with a steam table. A few wizened and tired looking fellows lingered over their beers in the bar - maybe contemplating days when lodges like the Moose had memberships in the tens of thousands. Beyond the bar, a glassed off 'smoking area' was crowded with people. I imagine a separate smoking area would be about as alien as a lunar lander would be to the founders of the fraternal order - times have changed even if the Moose hasn't.

Kelly and I passed the bar and smoking area and crossed the lobby to the ballroom. The dance floor was small but still bigger than some of the venues we've danced and in a lot better condition than many of them. Around the darkened room were photos and paintings, depictions of lodge life which probably meant a lot to the initiated. To me they were untranslatable emblems of a dark and dying culture - curiosities that pulled at the part of me that loves old venues, old buildings, and almost forgotten histories. As we found a spot at one of the tables around the floor the usual club music started playing and some of the atmosphere drained away, soon we were sweating and dancing and totally ignoring our surroundings - lost in a song and worrying over whether to try a double spin or an arm bar.

If you get a chance to dance the East Side Moose in Indy, do it. No, Buddy Rich never played their stage and the feet of a dozen generations haven't graced their hardwood floor. There's still something special about the place - something from a time when a fellow could leave work at four o'clock, put on a fez, and take his best girl down to the lodge for drinks and a dance with a few dozen brothers. There's something right about that.

The Cute Little Wigglin' Dance

I had a few moments during lunch today so I set out to harvest some graphics for the blog. I'm like a Viking when it comes to old graphics. I set forth in my computerized longboat, scouring the shores of distant lands for old ads, articles, paintings, and the like which I can loot. Then I return to my little cyber-village with my hoard, happy and ready to feast. You've seen the results of some of these forays – adulterated ads from the 40's and 50's that don't promote anything but a general sense of weirdness. It's fun and it satisfies my penitent for graffiti without requiring spray paint or the chance of going to jail.

Well, today I found myself on the waters of old sheet music and I started perusing cover art. There is some amazing cover art for the music of the teens, twenties, and thirties. After that it all becomes muggy headshots of Sinatra or Elvis done in low res on a purple or blue or pink background. The ragtime era stuff is much more inventive if you can stomach occasional racist imagery and titles. I tend to like the covers with a deco flare and that (along with the weird title) drew me to the piece of sheet music I'm writing about today.

"The Cute Little Wigglin' Dance" had me at 'wigglin' dance'. I mean, that's such a visual: what exactly is the wigglin' dance? What sorts of steps does it have? On what occasion would you do the wigglin' dance? Part of me thinks it’s a great euphemism for really having to pee yet another part of me wants to make it a lot bawdier. You know the Victorians came up with names for body parts just so they wouldn't have to say 'leg' in public so maybe it's no different with wigglin' dance?

The artwork's got it all. Look at that bullet hat the poor girl's wearing. Is she dancing or is she about to be shot from a cannon? She's dressed in some kind of triple-decker dervish dress that's flaring out in spite of the fact she seems to be standing still. Maybe each layer is supported by some kind of cantilever system? Maybe this is a whole new and sadistic use of underwire? Of course, in the teens definition of modesty she's wearing an ankle-length underskirt in spite of the fact the bottom layer of her dress extends past her knees. Wouldn't want anyone thinking she's got loose morals – even if they might mistake her for an extra off the last Flash Gordon movie. Hey, at least she's wearing sensible shoes. Oh, and did you notice she's surrounded by huge mutant bacteria? Maybe the wigglin' dance is actually the last stage in some horrid, early 20th century plague that claimed the lives of youth during the ragtime era? Maybe this woman is dressed in the traditional garb of a culture that was wiped from the face of the earth by the unstoppable advance of the wigglin' dance epidemic of 1919? Only this bit of paper remains to tell of their once glorious civilization.

The song's architects actually have a pedigree worth mentioning. John Turner Layton (1894 – 1978) penned the music for "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans" in 1922 (used in an Astaire/Rogers dance number in the film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)) and "Whoa Tillie" (1923) which was popularized by Bessie Smith. Layton also performed in Vaudeville and eventually moved to England where he performed up into the 1960's. Henry Creamer (1879 – 1930) was the lyricist of the pair, writing the words to such songs as "After You've Gone" which Sophie Tucker popularized. In 1924 when he parted company with Layton, Creamer teamed with pianist James P. Johnson and contributed to such songs as "Alabama Stomp" and Ruth Etting's "If I Could be You". Creamer founded Club Clef with James Reese Europe in 1920.

I found the song on Rhapsody. It was performed by the Frisco Jass Band (no, not a typo, it's supposed to be 'ss'). It's a bouncy piece (I guess a wigglin' dance should be bouncy) with a sloppy trombone bit and a New Orleans feeling clarinet. Unfortunately, the version I heard didn't include any lyrics but I imagine they'd be the sort of words that would strike Bertie Wooster as 'pippy'. I'll never know, I guess. For now the lyrics are lost to time and maybe that's just as well. Sometimes when you actually reach back into the past and get hold of something like The Cute Little Wigglin' Dance you come back disappointed; it turns out to be less than you imagined. I won't stop looking though because I've got to know how Creamer described his 'wigglin' dance'. Hey, who knows what else I might find while I'm looking!

Kentucky Fried Swing

Generally I don't think of Kentucky when I think of swing. The two don't seem to go together in spite of the fact Kelly and I are spending a great deal of time trying to learn Rockabilly swing. I guess it's just a personal bias or something. Maybe I need to get over myself or something. However, one day while browsing for historic dance venues in the Midwest, I stumbled across the Lexington Hep Cats Swing Club based out of the University of Kentucky. I browsed their events and found mention of an outdoor dance at High Bridge Park and I got intrigued.

High Bridge Park is located in Jessamine County, southwest of Lexington, Kentucky. It's tiny. I mean really tiny. Like less than a city block. However it centers around some really great scenery. One amazingly beautiful aspect of the park is the way the Kentucky River winds through the property. The park is located high on a bluff over the river and from an observation platform cantilevered over the hollow you get a dramatic view of the river winding southward through the green, hilly countryside. The most amazing view, however, is the spur of the Norfolk-Southern railroad that spans the hollow to give the park its name.

What does this have to do with dancing? Well, another feature of the park is an outdoor dance pavilion built in the 1920's. In its long history, the dance pavilion has played host to famous personalities such as Williams Jennings Bryant however by 2000 it had fallen into decay. With luck some dedicated people stepped in and rescued the structure. Today it's been restored to a condition similar to what it would have been back when Bryant spoke at the site.

Saturday, May second we made a trip south to Lexington. The weekend turned out wet, breezy, and cold but, since the pavilion is covered, it didn't interfere with our plans. We spent the night in a run-of-the-mill hotel outside of Lexington and then made our way to the park Sunday afternoon. The view was everything that the park website advertized; an amazing panorama of the Kentucky countryside and the river. The pavilion is an amazing sight too. Imagine that on the sight of this structure so many amazing things have happened.

Whenever we go to a historic venue I like to think about all that's happened in that spot before I ever became aware it existed. In High Bridge I think about all the joyous moments that have filtered through the old dance floor and soaked into the ground. A dance floor is all about fantasy: envisioning the music, feeling the beat, and sensing your partner all boils down to constructing a reality out of the air. Dance venues are places of bliss and heartbreak – just think about how many couples first saw each other across a dance floor and how many budding love affairs withered and died to the strains of Satin Doll or Some Enchanted Evening and its hard not to believe every dancehall is haunted in one way or another.

The band for the day was the MetroGnomes out of Jessamine County, Kentucky. Let me tell you, if you get a chance to see the MetroGnomes, don't hesitate just grab your dance shoes and go. They're a big band in all senses of that term. They really rocked the old pavilion in the way it deserved. Their tempo is hot, in the one set we stayed for they played one slow dance. I can only hope they follow Terry Lee's example and migrate northward into Indiana so that we can catch them again. I think they'd do the Indiana Roof proud.

As I mentioned, we only could stay for one set. The problem with traveling (even to Lexington) for a Sunday afternoon dance is that you've got to allow for the trip home and enough time to get to bed, get up, and get to work on Monday morning. I bemoan the decline of social dancing if only for the fact it relegated many dance events to Sundays when venues aren't being rented out by bigger, money-making ventures. Maybe there'll be resurgence, though I would argue the down economic environment argues against that since dance isn't a cheap hobby. Anyway, we finally rolled in to our driveway around 10 o'clock on Sunday night with tired eyes and a swing tune in our hearts. Being tired on Monday morning seldom feels this good.

The Luck of the Draw

This weekend Kelly and I attended a tea dance at the West Baden Springs Resort in West Baden, IN. I've visited the resort before and marveled at its dome and turn of the century décor. In fact I got a chance to visit once before the place was officially opened to the public. The IHLF (Indiana Historical Landmarks Foundation) held a few tours of the property to raise capital for restoration before a buyer could be found. The only thing I got to do was walk the gardens and stand beneath the still-under-reconstruction dome. It was an amazing experience and it's only gotten better.

Today West Baden Springs is an operating hotel and it's been restored to a close proximity of its old glory. The Tea Dance was held in the atrium, that is to say under that 200 foot span of dome I mentioned earlier, to the tune of a big band out of Louisville. The acoustics – well, to be generous they were horrible. Though the hotel hosted dances under its dome it never was designed for the dancers' listening pleasure. The sound echoes and bounces and gets lost in space making it difficult if not impossible to keep track of the beat. Add to that you're dancing on a marble terrazzo floor – murder on the feet.

Still there's something about dancing under a dome that was built in 1907 that makes the poor acoustics and sore feet worth enduring.

We talked to a few people at the dance, most notably a lovely lady from Louisville who was kind enough to compliment our swing. When we mentioned being from Indianapolis she asked about the Indiana Roof Ballroom and we happily told her it was one of our favorite places to dance. She nodded and looked a little wistful, then told us that Louisville doesn't have any of its old ballrooms still in operation.

Sometimes in the hustle and push of day to day life I forget how lucky we really are to be dancing in Indy. It's easy, deadlines bear down and life can take some bad turns. After this weekend I've got one more thing to remember when those bad times come around. We've still got The Roof, Madam Walker, Fountain Square Theatre, and the West Baden Springs Resort. They're three grand old ladies of the past, still doing what they've done for almost a century and doing it with style. There are places where the marquees don't flash any more, where the quirky hardwood floors have been torn up, where the beaux art facades all met the wrecking ball, and where the sound of a mediocre dance band doesn't shake ghosts of Tommy Dorsey and Cab Calloway loose from the rafters. We're lucky not to live in one of those places.

I'll try to remember that the next time I catch my toe on a floorboard that doesn't quite lie flat or when I have to deal with parking that's more of a suggestion than an actuality. When I do, I'll smile and think. "Lady, you got style." And I'll hope the next tune is a lively one because the old girl always did like 'em that way.

Practice, Practice, Practice

I wish that dancing wasn’t about practice. In the vision I had of myself dancing it was an easy thing – a natural thing that didn’t require practice. In that vision I’d get out there on the floor and the steps would just come like mana from heaven. It was all natural, just get out there and do it. Unfortunately, reality is a little different.

This Saturday is a practice day – in fact a special day where we set up a double lesson as a sort of Lindy Hop intensive. We’re beginners with the hop and it’s been slow (mainly because I’m slow). I’ll be honest – it took a long time for me to get the basic step for the Lindy Hop. It’s a great dance, all about energy and exuberance and forgetting all the things that bum you out about life.

To quote from The Lindy Circle:

“Looking back on where the Lindy Hop came from is an amazing study of American history and of the global cultural shift facilitated by the American GI's that traveled in World War II.

The influences of the Charleston and Tap dance are evident still in the Lindy we do today and the dance is also sited to have come from an early version of the Foxtrot. Remnants of older dancers such as the Cakewalk, Texas Tommy, Black bottom and popular "animal" dances such as the Turkey Trot and the Buzzard Lope are also expressed. What is interesting is that these came from African social dance culture, and some, like the Cakewalk was created when blacks imitated and mocked the formal dance structure of the whites, which they would then use in their entertainment routines. Ironically, the white spectators would then copy the entertainers, and a social dance that bridged the divide emerged.

Luckily, the two cultures found a common ground, called the Savoy Ballroom in New York. It was here that Lindy was fine tuned and grounded, and where the "Savoy style" that was to influence the world grew up.”

I’m not ready to influence the world with my Lindy – maybe I’m ready to influence a few dancers to leave the floor just for their own safety, but that’s about it. Still the history of the dance and what it means in American history impresses me and I’ve got a ‘thing’ for the 20’s and 30’s so I’m taking a wild swing at learning the steps.

Today we added a few steps to our repertoire (forgive me Melissa; I’m going to butcher the names):

• Side Steps – Finally we’re not going around and around and around and around! This step extends the basic Lindy step to the left or right with a cross-over step and it actually (for a change) seemed to come pretty easy.
• Transitions from Triple Swing to the Lindy – We’ve got the EC Triple Swing down pretty well (it’s the dance we do most often) and now we can transition from a closed EC Triple position to a Lindy Hop basic. Nice to throw in here and there on off-tempo EC Swings.
• Transitions from Lindy to EC Triple Swing – Going the other direction we can change from the Lindy to the EC Triple. Nice since all we can do is a few steps in the Lindy!

I don’t think we’re ready to take the Lindy out on the road yet – but soon, very soon!