Calling My Second Family Dance

June 17th, 2024
contra, kids
Yesterday I called my second family dance, which went pretty well! I've stopped calling regular contra dances because I don't enjoy it very much anymore, but these two have been a lot of fun and I'm up for doing more.

As usual we played with an open band, led by Ricci, and this time Nora decided to play bass:

Despite the flyers, no one from the kids classes showed up. They've had much more luck specifically inviting one or two friends. On the other hand, it probably didn't help that it was father's day.

Here's what I called, which borrowed a lot from last time. Since that was almost two years ago, though, I think it's fine!

  • La Bastringue, variant where you keep your partner. Same dance I started with last time, and as before I didn't do a walk through and called while I danced. It went well!

  • The Low-Backed Car. Same as last time. Another good dance!

  • Heel-Toe Polka. This is the only dance I called where you don't keep your partner, but I told people it was fine to dance tandem. This dance is half-length, so it's important to make sure the band plays AB.

  • Water break. It was hot!

  • Bridge of Athelone. We had slightly too many couples for the music at ~10, but it worked ok and we didn't get off the music.

  • The Blob Dance. Would have been slightly better with more dancers, but it was fine.

  • Sasha. This one Lily called; her first time! She did great! Probably the most popular dance we do, and the only one I have kids requesting by name.

  • Water break. We like to end Sasha unreasonably fast, so it was welcome.

  • Jacob's Potato. This dance has a whole-set circle in a lonyways dance, which is fun.

  • Galopede. I hadn't been planning to do eight dances in an hour, but the timing worked out for it. This was slightly too close to the other longways dances we'd done; I should work up a dance that is a bit more distinct.

It was a good time!

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Thing of Things AI use policy

dynomight recently wrote an article calling for bloggers to state publicly whether and how they use AI

via Thing of Things July 6, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)