The free raisins played for the new brandeis contra dance on saturday night. It was a good mix, both of new and experienced dancers but also brandeis students and other area dancers. Tony Parkes did a great job calling; he's been doing it for years and really knows what he's doing with a newish crowd. [1] I think overall we played pretty well, though not having monitors [2] made it hard to coordinate. We're looking forward to the next one, 3-6pm saturday november 20th.

[1] One person at the dance remarked on his skills as a caller, describing him as 'badass'. I think he's great, but I think the term is decaying from overuse. Someone who parallel parks with the handbrake or carefully builds up immunity to a poison over years in preparation for a possible future confrontation is 'badass'. Just being highly competent at a helpful skill is not enough. In general, trying to fight semantic drift is hopeless, but at least I can still complain.

[2] We were putting a sound system together from a mix of sources. This is not all that pleasant, but in this case went ok. We had a low powered pa system from the school along with three mics with stands, tony brought a wireless mic and receiver, and amy borrowed a keyboard and amp from a friend. We ended up putting the mandolin also through that amp, which worked, except that lacking a low cut it would pick up my stomping and amplify it as a low bass techno-like beat. That could have been a neat effect, though it was pretty much drowned out by other stuff once we started playing.