JWG (jwg) wrote,
JWG
jwg

Dance camp was wonderful as usual

I'm still pretty tired from all the dancing, but LCFD dance camp was wonderful. Our band, The Moving Violations was splendid. We had them at camp a couple of years ago. They have two lovely CDs (I bought them both a while ago and to help prepare for camp we listened to part of one on the way down).
Linda Leslie who is one of my favorite contra dance callers was in excellent form as usual. I missed doing exactly one contra dance and did two of the three English sessions called by Graham Christian. There was also some 2-stepping but I didn't do any of that.

One of things about contra dancing is that you get to dance with a different partner each dance and since there were many hours of contra dance you can dance with many people. And since it is a progressive dance you get to interact with all the other people in your line as well. Unlike most of the rest of life you get to look into people's eyes frequently while swinging, gypsying (that's swinging with your eyes instead of arms), and other moves. Some people have the most beautiful eyes. There were 95 of us, some are people I dance with regularly in JP and occasionally at other places, many are people I see twice a year at camp and there were some new people. Another thing we do at camp is to make name tag buttons with pictures from magazines. Some people make quite artistic buttons, sometimes I bring a photograph (such as us dancing behind Chris's old bus in the gay pride parade); I often try to have an indirect dancing theme such as animal's feet; this time it was about allemand right.

The weather was gorgeous this time - last year at this site was the foot-of-rain mother's day weekend. The grounds of Woodstock YMCA Camp are really nice. It is situated on a small lake where you can see just one other house on the other side of the lake. There were some people fishing (I guess it is stocked) and lots of us went boating and swimming (I can't believe the lake was warm enough to swim in - even I went in and I don't like cold water). The woods were full of young plants, I saw some red trillium blooming, partridge berry (too soon for flowers), what I thought was poison ivy but it wasn't, canada mayflower, and various other things. There are several heated dorm buildings and lots of unheated cabins to stay in. The food was pretty good - I think most people liked it.

On the way home we caused the RedSox to win again by listening to the end of the game.

As treasurer I still have a bit of work to do to finish up and determine if we broke even or made a bit of money (I think we did but can't tell yet since I don't have the data about some cancellations and refunds).

And only five months until the next dance camp where we return to the YMCA camp at Becket (MA) where we have had many camps in the past. And then next May it is back to Woodstock. We will be alternating between the two locations.
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