Beantown & Midsummer Night’s Swing
So it finally stopped raining and summer has arrived in NYC, thus I’ve been out doing things and not so much reporting on the doing of said things.
So here we go.
I went up to Massachusetts to the Beantown camp and stayed in a dorm at picturesque Endicott College. I thought the dorms I got at good old SU were ghetto, but the new dorms they build now are so cheap they don’t even put doors on the closets or give you one of those cheap sucky metal bedside lights that stick out of the wall. I could only imagine two girls trying to share the room I was staying in—it had a slanted roof and yet included bunkbeds. Like can you imagine the fighting? Who wants to volunteer to be the one to bang their head on the ceiling every night? Especially after a few drinks. And the closet thing. Take two 18-21 year old girls and give them itty bitty closets right next to each other with no doors on them. You might as well throw one piece of raw meat into a cage with two hungry lions and see what kind of chaos ensues.
All right, so camp. There were two tracks—one was optional classes were you can pick and choose different topics you’re interested in and the other is your assigned level which is color-coded. You determine your color level when you sign up, by answering a bunch of questions. I ended up being a yellow—which is the second level. Unfortunately, the leads pretty much all over-compensated and put themselves in levels where they shouldn’t be. So yellow was slow, and painful and as a follower I encountered many dilemmas for which I had no plan of action.
There was the guy who looked young and healthy, but walked through the dance—almost like he was on Prozac. I’m not sure he even heard the music. Now, for you non-dance people, the issue is as a follower you don’t really have any control. You just well, follow. So I tried to bounce a bit, so maybe he’d notice the rhythm, the music—the fact that other people were actually dancing—nope, didn’t work. I finally just gave up and kept praying for the teacher to scream “rotate”.
Then there was the 80+ year old man, who looked like a stray breeze would knock him down. He kept telling me that I need to bring him around during a swingout. Now going back to the follow principle—Follows don’t initiate anything—and we don’t create momentum—we react to the leaders. So really the force he starts with, should propel me when I follow his lead. The fact that the man was older than dirt and shockingly frail would indicate he lacked the force to do so. But now if I create my own momentum to bring him around in a circle, will I break him? When I say frail, I mean frail. My podmate (they call suites in the dorms, “pods” – very Star Trekesque) Arla, caught sight of him after my story and told me I was being generous with the age—he was way older than 80. I almost passed out when I saw him walk into the solo Charleston class. He told me later I was “brave” for taking the class and that he’d taken it a few years ago. Now, if you don’t know Charleston—google it. It’s kicking and jumping and fast and fast and faster. The last time that guy should have been attempting a Charleston was when it first came out—back in 1923.
Anyways, the first few days of camp were fairly rough, as there were a lot of people and most of them were older, so it was really hard to click with anyone. I did have a very nice podmate (the aforementioned Arla) and we had a good time. At one point we tried to escape our middle-of-nowhere college, as we heard there was a Dunkin Donuts down the road, but a two mile walk later and alas, it wasn’t true. We did find a liquor store, so all was not lost.
Now, here’s the part where you’ll be proud of me. First, I need to explain my philosophy on courage. I think courage is like a muscle, you need to exercise it from time to time or it gets all flabby and useless and when you need it the most, it just won’t work. So I decided to exercise my courage a bit. They had competitions at this lovely camp, and there is a novice category for those “new to dancing”. So I decided since I may never attend another dance camp and I most likely will never be remotely interested in competing, I will give it a try. It basically works like a bunch of guys and girls enter, and they randomly assign you partners and you swap a few times. You’re judged on how well you lead and follow. I did it and it wasn’t so bad—I survived, didn’t stop like a deer caught in the headlights of a car, even when I got one lead who was leading crap that was impossible to follow without knowing the whole move in question. I even had a newbie swing dancer tell me I was their favorite follow to watch! It felt good to try something I never ever would have imagined attempting and realizing it wasn’t nearly as bad as being afraid of it was. A very valuable lesson and one I vehemently recommend all of you try out sometime.
And so I bought myself a little magnet with an Eleanor Roosevelt quote that reads “do one thing every day that scares you” and I’m trying to adhere to it. Although there’s a few new things I’ve tried that aren’t quite suitable for blogging and which I’m sure Eleanor Roosevelt was not alluding to, but hey it’s all in the spirit of it.
My journey back from camp was fairly epic, which is funny since Boston and NYC are not all that far apart. But since it rained the day I left (and every day of the trip) my flight was delayed for longer than the actual flight takes…but that was no biggie. Then, when I got to the airport I tried to take a cab home. I hear an interesting tidbit on the radio…the Lincoln tunnel was shut down because of a sink hole—that’s right, a sink hole magically appeared and there was an hour and a half wait. What’s next? Pterodactyls swooping across the entrance picking up cars and throwing them into the river? This of course caused delays in all the other ways off the godforsaken island. So I get this bright idea to bypass these and have the cab take me to ferry and then take the ferry home and have my mom pick me up at the pier. So the sketchy cab driver keeps trying to get me to pay with cash and tell him how much money I have. Plus he tries to get me to pay the same amount it would cost to for my ride to Jersey even though I’m only going to Manhattan. I offer to pay him less (basically what I feel like paying) and he accepts so I get out in the pouring rain, pulling my own bags from the trunk. I finally get on a ferry…I am almost home. And then..the ferry crashes into the pier. It was enough to have the crew gasping and screaming “oh shit”, and passengers hanging on for dear life. But luckily no hole in the boat or people flying into the Hudson. S, success. My mom finally picks me up and I do get home. The end.
Now for the rest of July, instead of taking dance classes I got myself a season pass to Midsummer Night’s Swing at Lincoln Center and am just going dancing after work. There are plenty of interesting characters—the really old guys in vintage-esque suits, the woman who looked exactly like Cruella Deville and who gives me the heebie jeebies something fierce, plus a smattering of random people I know through my dance classes. The one thing I’ve learned from this social dancing is that I’m a much better dancer than I think I am. Other swing dancers will ask me how long I’ve been dancing and when I respond (since December) they are shocked. They say they think I’ve been dancing for years. Considering I never imagined being even passable at any form of dancing, this has been quite an ego boost. And I better enjoy it while it lasts because pretty soon I’ll hit the year mark and I won’t be all savant like, just mediocre.
So I’m enjoying my summer quite a bit and trying to make the most out of every second of non-rain like weather we have and I hope you’re doing the same.
