"There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good."
-- Edwin Denby
I don't write much about my day to day life, because generally it's not very interesting. But I enjoyed a rare perfect trifecta of dancing this past weekend: social dancing, taking class, and teaching. I don't find this combination very often outside a dance week, and it involved some schlepping around between states to accomplish. But along with the chance to visit with good friends, this combination makes pretty much my ideal weekend. So, for once, Rixo presents: This Is Susan's Life!
I started out Friday night at home in Connecticut with a visit to Yale Swing & Blues for their yearly kickoff dance with the Solomon Douglas Quartet. This was held in a local church basement, and with a good crowd of dancers (and a better age range than you'd expect at a college event) the temperature was sauna-like. It wasn't a matter of sweat dripping; it was more like streaming. Next time I'll bring my own water and a towel. But the music was excellent, I had some good dances with some good leaders, and I got to practice general Lindy following as well as some specific things I learned at Swing Out New Hampshire over Labor Day weekend, including the hand-to-hand Charleston, which was one of my weaker moves but is rapidly improving. If I want to maintain the level of Lindy I acquired at SONH, it's going to be critical for me to go out and dance it socially at least a couple of times a month, though how I'm going to fit this into my already crazed crowded schedule I really have no idea.
The other element of maintaining and improving my Lindy skills is to take regular workshops. I'm a bit stuck locally, since I'm now ahead of the typical beginner-level lesson series and would need to do some serious driving to get up to where there are more demanding offerings. Gas prices make this less than ideal. But since I had to go into NYC on Sunday to teach anyway, I took the opportunity to head in a day early and take a lesson on jumps in Lindy with SONH instructor Nathan Bugh. This turned out to include a reunion with a fellow SONH alum as well. I'd never done any jumping in Lindy, so the material was all new to me, but I was able to pick up most of the specific moves. More importantly, I spent some after-class practice time with one of the other students and he was able to lead me in some simple jumps which I had not learned. I'd managed to internalize the "jump coming!" lead enough to apply it to new moves, including an interesting combination of jump and underarm turn that clearly had the potential to dislocate my shoulder if I messed it up. That felt like a real accomplishment, though I also discovered that the correct combination of spinning and jumping will lodge my (dangly crystal) earring inside my ear, which I suspect loses me serious cool points. Note to self: find Lindy-specific jewelry along with clothes.
My overall style needs work, too. I'm not particularly used to jumping straight up in the air, and I need to practice keeping myself balanced and raising my knees. I don't think said knees will allow me ever to be a really good jumper, but I can do somewhat better with practice. Now I just need a leader to work with!
There's not much point as a follower in memorizing a lot of moves, so other than in Charleston (this is the 1940s version used in Lindy, probably heavily folk-processed over the last twenty-odd years of the swing revival, not the original 1920s version) I mostly work more on general following skill than on particular figures. But I was especially pleased with a jump that came right out of a basic side-by-side Charleston where after the rock-step you walk forward a couple of steps and then jump onto your outside foot while turning so as to cross the inside foot behind it. Then you pull the inside foot back and draw the outside foot to it slowly. (Probably no one reading this except Jeff is going to make any sense of this, but it helps me remember!) Nathan taught it with a two-count step-draw, but my practice partner and I agreed we liked it more if we took four counts before returning to a Charleston with a rock-step. Extra drama, less rush, and yes, our tango was showing.
Sometime during practice another pair of teachers wandered in and started practicing a new move they'd worked out, and when we started trying to quietly imitate them in a corner they were nice enough to stop and teach it to us too. I don't think I can describe it well. Six counts; on the 3&4 I curl backwards into the leader's right arm, keeping my left hand in his right, as he moves a bit behind me and then sends me back out again. Easier to do than to explain, and had a nice compress-and-release feeling to it. It's not going to stick in my head unless I get to practice it, though.
After all this jumping around, I came out to find that Tropical Storm Hanna had arrived in New York in the form of a torrential downpour. That was when I realized that I had left my umbrella in my car, which was parked at the train station in Connecticut. Oops. Fifteen soggy minutes later, I washed up at the Apple Store on 14th Street to attempt to catch up on email and blogging. I was so sopped I was streaming water; fortunately my laptop bag is waterproof. I dripped sadly up the spiral stairs and found a corner to occupy. I was amused to find that the Apple Store had a supply of custom-fitted stair treads to put over the spiral stairs when it was wet and slippery; they were fitting them on as I went up. It was absolutely freezing in the store, so I sort of cuddled around my laptop to share in the battery warmth and got very little work done.
Dinner was at Caravan of Dreams with Lady Mondegreen and A.K.A.Wil (I don't know what the etiquette is here, since I don't think of people by their LJ nicks: should I use real names and link to the LJs, use real names and not link, or use the LJ nicks and link? Help!) Caravan is one of those extremely crunchy vegan places (is there any other kind of vegan place?) that advertises Live Food, which I find vaguely frightening. I think they just mean raw, but I keep visualizing being attacked by small pieces of rabid tofu (looking sort of like the Adipose from Doctor Who). I'm quite carnivorous and just as happy for my food to be indisputably dead, but to eat with LadyM I have to accommodate her kosher observance. The chance to converse with her is entirely worth spending dinner warily eying the food for any hint that it wants to jump at me. At Caravan, I always end up having the safely tofu-free nachos with black bean salsa, which technically are an appetizer but are a large enough portion to be an entire meal.
On the drive back to their place in NJ we discovered that she and I are both Harry Chapin fans, so we spent the evening watching a video of his final concert while googling up lyrics and background and reminiscing about when we first learned particular songs. (If there's anyone reading this who likes story-songs and doesn't already own Chapin's Greatest Stories Live, you need to remedy this immediately!) I can't resist singing along with Chapin songs, which is no favor to anyone around me, but as filkers, they were very tolerant.
There's something terribly weird about watching a concert very much in the 1970s tradition (1981 was still fairly '70s) with laptops on our laps.
After the concert I fell asleep in a chair in mid-conversation so they put me to bed. I woke up Sunday morning and sort of worked until they woke up. Then I remembered I'd wanted to show LadyM a whole series of "to the tune of" found filks on cookery on the New Pals Club Web-Log. This turned out to be one of those small world things: she already know the person who'd blogged them, Kip W. (who may be found on Rixo of late, on the merrily topic-drifting Thorne Smith comment thread).
Sunday was the usual blur of one of my teaching days, starting with a pizza brunch with stakebait to catch up on gossip. Then I taught for five hours for The Elegant Arts Society. The Regency class ended up being an intensive review of The Royal Scotch Quadrilles in preparation for the Assembly rather than the mix of dances I'd intended, but they clearly needed the review (and we were incorporating two new dancers, including occasional Rixo commenter Raven, who'd never done hays before but acquitted herself so well in a dance chock-full of them that I didn't realize it until she confessed after class!) I went over some of the necessary foot fudges a bit as well. The second class was on the 1910s maxixe (a Brazilian import by way of Paris and the immediate ancestor of the samba). I had a small class with dreadful gender balance, but ladies gamely stepped up to lead (and did quite well) and we got through almost my entire basic maxixe syllabus, which is fairly impressive. Having everyone there be experienced dancers helped, of course; I didn't have to start with "how to two-step."
The title of this post is a play on my Newport Dance Week t-shirt, which I was wearing Sunday, and which has on the back the following sequence:
Eat
Dance
Dance
Eat
Dance
Change
Eat
Dance
Change
Eat
Change
Dance
Eat
Dance
Dance
Eat
Sleep (optional)
This is a not-terribly-unreasonable description of a day at Newport. The changing refers to the fancy costumes one wears to the balls along with the frequent changes out of sweaty practicewear. On my way back to Grand Central I was stopped in the subway station by a contra dancer who wanted me to explain the shirt, which resulted in me missing the early train by seconds (standing on the platform watching it pull away, sigh). I got home late, and after a quick trip to resupply groceries and deposit the class money I collapsed into bed.
Live Food? You know you're a hopeless SF fan when tofu makes you think of Doctor Who. As for myself, when I visited Washington DC, in 1990, especially the Lincoln Memorial, I'd think of The Day The Earth Stood Still. How sacrilegious.
That being said, it sounds like many calories were burned away during that trip of yours.
Posted by: Serge | September 09, 2008 at 10:17 AM
I've always pictured the wild gamboling tofu as a chubby pinkish piglet-like animal, but fluffier and more cartoon-like than real pigs. And I'm unclear as to whether they have 4 or 6 legs - I've been going back and forth on this point.
Posted by: Keira | September 09, 2008 at 10:19 AM
Do I dare argue with a baby vet over taxonomy? :) Sure!
I think that the sort of vague whitish smooshiness of tofu in its natural form means it would stay vague, white, and smooshy in its, err, animated form. It should be more potential than actual, if you know what I mean.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | September 09, 2008 at 10:29 AM
What about skin? That's why I think it has a pale pinkish cast - it's the protecting outer layer for the smooth, white, smooshy interior.
Oooh! There are different firmnesses of tofu - different musculature? The equivalent of white and dark meat in the chicken?
Posted by: Keira | September 09, 2008 at 11:23 AM
I think if live tofu had skin, it would be a light tan/golden color...at least, that's what I thought of o.O Mostly because when you fry it the outside gets sort of firm and gold while the inside stays squishy and white.
But what about silken tofu? It wouldn't seem to have enough firmness for any musculature at all!
Posted by: Raven | September 09, 2008 at 02:30 PM
Probably best that I more or less slept through Sunday's class so I didn't get in the way of people who were doing actual Assembly prep (*sigh*).
I followed the Lindy step well enough, shifting my head over to follower's feet, despite my swing being decidedly rough (as in "learned swing from four different individual or sets of classes, mostly from teachers who didn't know what they were doing either, mostly fake it" rough). What's the lead doing on those?
Posted by: Joshua Kronengold | September 09, 2008 at 05:29 PM
Ha! I didn't know akawil was A.K.A. Wil. I thought it was soemthing like a KAW il.
You may have been tired out, but it sure sounds like you had a good time!
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | September 09, 2008 at 07:46 PM
Keira and Raven:
You guys are totally grossing me out! I think tofu bears an unfortunate resemblance to solidified bodily fluids, and the idea of them growing a skin (pink or tan or whatever) isn't helping! :)
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | September 09, 2008 at 08:16 PM
Josh:
On the Charleston exit jump, the lead and follow are in perfect mirror image. On the other move, I couldn't begin to tell you!
Improving my Lindy from rough and mostly faked was the whole point of SONH for me. It pretty much worked.
Marilee:
I claim no special insight; it's right on the top of his LJ. I've no idea what it means, either!
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | September 09, 2008 at 08:18 PM
Raven: Silken tofu is definitely some sort of organ meat. Also, as to skin color, I suppose there could be golden and pinkish breeds of tofu. Gotta have some variation in there somewhere, seeing as something as bizarre as the tofu creature is bound to be full of fun mutations.
Susan: You should have known this would be a dangerous topic of conversation to even slightly encourage... ;)
Posted by: Keira | September 10, 2008 at 10:27 AM
It's "AKA Wil". When LMG started posting about "Wil", she used that pseudonym. So when he got his own LJ account, he signed on as "AKA Wil" to preserve the pseudonymity. FWIW, when I asked LMG about names, she said she didn't mind people using her first name (though not associating it with her lj, ideally) but avoiding her last name to avoid teh googles.
I meant the exit jump, I think. Compress & Release move seems simple enough; similar to curl&release moves I already do except the timing is different and the positioning is more precise, I think.
I love tofu, but I'll avoid the discussion here to avoid contributing to the "gross Susan out" fund.
Posted by: Joshua Kronengold | September 10, 2008 at 11:16 AM
Josh:
The compress and release move was actually fairly tough to do. I'm not describing it very effectively.
General:
I don't care if the tofu critter discussion continues; I love having conversation in my comment threads and clearly this is a very important issue. Just don't expect much input from me except an occasional horrified yip.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | September 10, 2008 at 11:21 AM
Susan: I believe it. Have to demonstrate or something.
Re tofu: I think, given the sameness of tofu, that if it had skin, it would be because it had stolen it from living creatures, having devoured them from the inside out, dissolving them by turning them into tasty, soft tofu.
Lightly fried/cured tofu can be nice, but my favorite tofu dish (except maybe ma po, 'cause, you know, it's ma po) is probably a non-spicy Grand Sichuan special -- very soft (but not silken) white tofu with butterfly shimps and some vegitables. Simple, but really tasty.
Posted by: Joshua Kronengold | September 10, 2008 at 03:55 PM
I hate tofu, no matter what state its in. It's the texture -- the same reason I don't like liver or yogurt.
As to akawil, I've never seen his LJ, but he posts on the LJs of some of my friends.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | September 10, 2008 at 07:54 PM
Keira: tofu would totally have many mutations...but how many legs does the tofu creature have? I'm seeing either two or four.
Susan: aw, come on-it's so yummy! Sometimes it's important to play with one's food, even hypothetically ~.^
Posted by: Raven | September 10, 2008 at 08:02 PM
Marilee:
I can't get past the smell of liver. And yogurt bothers me the same way tofu does, except that instead of solidified bodily fluids it has the texture of congealed bodily fluids. Or curdled bodily fluids. I can only stomach it in smoothies, where I drown it in so much fruit that it's not obvious. Shudder
Now I am thinking of critter-tofu as visually akin to Pikachu and its fellow Pokémon. I am not clear that this is an improvement...
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | September 10, 2008 at 08:54 PM
Susan...
How about liver-flavored yogurt?
("Urp!")
Posted by: Serge | September 10, 2008 at 10:40 PM
Raven: Four legs. Because it needs to bound around in fields, and it's very difficult to bound with only two legs.
PS - boo to the comment feed for never actually updating.
Posted by: Keira | September 13, 2008 at 11:44 AM