I've been busy.  Since I last wrote, I found employment as an administrative staff member at a local marketing company.  On top of that, I went to visit my family down near Columbus one weekend, we had a group of friends in town another weekend, and David and I took a joint private dance lesson from Mike "the Girl" Legett and Dan Rosenthal.  Also, this coming weekend we are attending Mile High Blues in Denver.

The job is going well.  The people I work with are really fun and the office is very open and surrounded by windows, so there's lots of sunlight.  I feel pretty comfortable with my work; it's similar to my last job in a lot of ways, and I'm getting a fair hand on the parts that are new and different.

Visiting my family was really nice.  I went down to volunteer for Rick and Rose's Destination Imagination competition. DI is a creative problem-solving competition that helps kids develop skills in creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, time management, and project management.  Rick's team placed first in their division, and will be going on to the state tournament next month.

Elizabeth also volunteered for the tournament (every team had to bring a volunteer).  She and I got to spend that evening back at her place where we curled up with some cups of tea and pretended for a couple of hours like we still get to live near each other.  It was so wonderful to see her; it makes me sad that we don't see each other as often now that I'm in Cleveland.

And we celebrated Rose's ninth birthday at Coco Key - the local indoor water park.  Elizabeth joined us for the party as well. The party was on Sunday night, so the girls were able to have the place mostly to themselves.  (It is so incredibly weird to realize that Rose is nine.  And Rick is nearly eleven!  When did they get to be so old?!) 

The weekend David and I hosted a group of friends who are also local-ish dancers was bucket-loads of fun. We hung out at our apartment and talked, drank, and watched movies (Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and Despicable Me), which is something we don't often get to do since we are typically too busy dancing. We also went to Wooster's new monthly dance, which was particularly neat for me because I went to school there (when there was no swing club and definitely no blues dancing).  Fenna also attended the dance and took some incredible pictures.

And she took photos at a dance that David and I attended in February.  

 Which brings us to David and I taking a lesson together.  It may have been the best thing that's ever happened to our dancing as a couple.  Something about the way we danced was fighting each other, and Mike and Dan worked with us both separately and together. We started out with David and I working with both Mike and Dan, and then I went with Mike and David worked with Dan.  Then we switched instructor/student pairs so that I was working with Dan and David with Mike. At the end, we came back together and worked as four again. The result is a clearer connection that is more comfortable for both of us.

I have a theory, of which I am rapidly growing more and more fond, that the key to improving your dancing is direct feedback and an open mind.  Because I am about to slam large group workshops, I want to be very clear that I am NOT saying that private lessons are necessary.  All you need is someone or someones to work with, with an open, stated understanding that constructive criticism will be given and received.  There are a lot of ways to achieve this, but I am very certain that workshop classes don't cut it.  Instructors cannot (or will not) say to a specific person that they are or are not doing something, and group criticism generally won't do the trick.  More often than not the result of a mass correction is that people who needed the criticism think they're doing it right and don't correct it and people who were doing fine start to over-correct.

BUT - if you take what you learned in said workshop and bring it to your friends with a "let's see if we're doing this right" approach, you can work through it and make sure that the move/ connection exercise/ stylization/ alignment/ whatever is turning out correctly (or at least in a way that is not uncomfortable for anyone involved).

This, then, is why David and I had such an incredible lesson.  We gave each other feedback, Mike and Dan gave us feedback (both from watching us dance and from dancing with us), and between the four of us we worked through several major issues in our dance. 

On that fabulous note, David and I are going to head out this weekend to Denver for the Mile High Blues exchange.  More words when I return.

Boston Adventures, January 2011 - Part 1

New Year's Eve, December 31, 2010

We flew into Boston a few days early so we could attend their New Year's Eve Gala. It was a lovely night of dancing to the sounds of Shawn Hershey and the Fried Bananas and guest vocalist Jan Marie, hosted by Boston Swing Central. Jan Marie, in addition to being fabulous company and a very talented dancer, has an unbelievable voice.  (I told her at dinner a few nights later that she may look like a small white girl, but it is evident from her voice that she is in fact a large black woman.) David and I got all dressed up for the occasion in black and green, but we unfortunately completely failed to get a photo of ourselves.

The evening also had a short break for some entertainment: The Harlem Hobos

The Boston Museum of Science, January 2, 2011

Saturday - New Year's Day - we spent with Grayden and Koren, who were hosting us for the night.  We hung out in their kitchen, partaking of an excellent breakfast, courtesy of Koren's housemate, Phil, and Phil's friend, Tasha.  After breakfast there was a long period of iPad fascination and chit-chat that culminated in evening plans that never happened.  Instead of exploring downtown Boston, David and I explored a hotel swimming pool and some really terrible pizza.  I highly recommend a heated swimming pool and pizza as a post-New-Year's-Eve-in-Boston activity. 

On Sunday we had brunch at Jacob Wirth, well known for their beer selection and their chowder, both of which turned out to be excellent.  

After lunch we were torn between visiting the Robotics exhibit at MIT, the Natural History Museum at Harvard, the New England Aquarium, and/or the Boston Museum of Science. It was a really tough call (yes, I know; we're geeks), and we had originally hoped to get to two of them, but a late start meant we had to pick only one.  In the end, we decided on the science museum.

We saw neat exhibits on M.C. Escher, optical illusions, the senses, light, and math.

In the first one, the reds are both the same color and the blues are both the same color.  In the second one you have to pick out the one + or O that is not like the others. If you click on the image, you should be able to view the larger image.

When you click the button on any side of this box, the shape(s) hanging on that side dip into the soap solution below and come up with bubbles in the shape. I actually didn't read what mathematical hoopla this proved or demonstrated, because I was so fascinated with the shapes the bubbles made. 

 

  

There was a lot of cool stuff in the math exhibit; even though I don't particularly care for math, the machines and demonstrations were very impressive.  David particularly enjoyed the probability illustration: balls were dropped from the center top of the box, and they fell randomly through the pegs to create a bell curve. [Quote on the probability box: "The theory of probability is nothing more than good sense confirmed by calculation."]

Whoa...

So I was looking over the previous entry, and yikes! it's long.  I'm going to offer both my apologies and the excuse that I was sick when I wrote it, and therefore perhaps not in the best frame of mind for self-critique.  It's a nice overview of the weekend, but in the future I will offer up bits and pieces at a time. 

On Mondays I've been going with a friend, Kaitlyn, to the OSU Swing Club meetings, which involve two lessons and a social dance, all free and open to the public.  They're a lot of fun, although the attendance does tend to peter out quite a bit after the lessons, leaving a much smaller group for the dance. 

It's neat, and a tiny bit horrifying, to watch the brand new dancers.  Neat, because there's so much enthusiasm, and it's really great to watch people laughing at themselves and having fun as they work to learn this new skill.  It's a little bit awful, though, because as one watches, one becomes unavoidably aware that EVERYONE starts out looking awkward, with bad posture and poor lead-follow connection - so at one time, that was me.

The active members of the group do a great job with the club.  In addition to organizing some interesting classes, they are now making an active effort to make newcomers feel included.  In fact, as a regular attendee, I was turned down for a dance by a friend because he felt like he should dance with the new people.  I am particularly appreciative of this because when I first showed up to dance in Columbus, it was the least friendly scene I had approached.  Everywhere else I had danced - Oberlin, Cleveland, Pittsburgh - had been very friendly and not only had folks asked me to dance, but they went out of their way to say hi when they saw me again and made some effort to remember my name.  The entire Columbus scene took months and months to learn my name, and they never asked me to dance.  So if the club is going to make an effort to reach out to newcomers, I am fully behind that, and I don't mind being turned down in support of it.

Bohemian, September 2010

There's a dance in Cleveland on the last Saturday of every month at the Bohemian National Hall.  It's really very well attended; it's held in a large ballroom, and the floor is almost always full.  (A lot of regular venues in our otherwise very fine state are not quite so well attended, which is such a shame.)  Last night was no exception: the room was full to the brim with all ages and skill levels and everyone seemed to be having a fabulous time. 

I try to attend the Bohemian dance anytime I am in state, and I've been attending more or less regularly since after my first exchange.  Often I have stayed the night in Oberlin with Renata's parents during those weekends. Other times I have crashed on the couches of friends who live in Cleveland. Since David and I started dating in July, I've been able to stay at his place, which is in Lakewood (Lakewood apparently still counts as Cleveland - Cleveland seems to have somehow incorporated a large number of towns that maintain both their individual names and the collective "Cleveland.")  What makes this weekend new and different is that David is still in Portland, Oregon, for a dance workshop, so I'm here at his place on my own.  Staying here has been fun and a little odd, as was the exchange I had with several friends: "... and where's David?"  "In Portland." "Oh, do you need a place to stay?" "Nope!" 

I had a fabulous time at the dance last night.  The energy in the room seemed unusually high thanks to the band: The Demetrius Steinmetz Band, featuring Eileen Burns as vocalist. The music was as enjoyable to listen to as to dance to, and they played a variety of tempos and a mix of familiar and unfamiliar music.  In addition to excellent music, I had a particularly enjoyable range of dances: slow and quick, with friends and with strangers, and with a full range of skill levels from very skilled to just starting out.

One of the dances that particularly stood out was with a brand new dancer from Erie, PA.  He's a freshman, and  just trying swing out, but he thinks he likes it and wants to pursue it further.  What I found particularly notable was that even though he was new to dance, he A) tried wholeheartedly and B) was friendly and cheerful about the entire experience, even when he made a mistake.

I am constantly amazed by how friendly dancers are.  Perhaps it comes out of switching partners every dance?  You have to be open to meeting new people and willing to want to like them without knowing more about them than that they dance.  Naturally not everyone in the dance scene is so friendly, and plenty of scenes are notable for the cliques that have formed within them. I don't want to make dancing out to sound like a fairytale, but I have nonetheless found in my dancing experience that the majority of people who take up dancing do it because they like people and want to have fun and meet other people who like to have fun.  It's generally a very friendly crowd.