All the Way Around

In Bloomington, we stayed with an old friend of Dave’s dad. He entertained us with stories of their folk dancing days and printed us out a map of Bloomington, circling points of interest. We spent the entire day, before the contra dance, exploring the college town: the library, the university campus, and Lake Monroe, the largest lake in Indiana.

We had two very different dining experiences in Bloomington. We ate lunch at a place that the town is famous for: Nick’s English Hut. The food there was not only delicious but was also mostly local. The restaurant prided itself on its hormone and antibiotic free beef from a 100 year old farm nearby. The best part of the meal, for me, was the home-made bread and side salad, which was made with fresh field greens—not a hint of iceberg. For dinner, we went to an Indian Restaurant. Someone at a table nearby us exclaimed that our waiter reminded her of Spiderman’s alter-ego, Peter Parker, but Dave and I just found him annoying. The food wasn’t good either. “We should have gone back to Nick’s,” we agreed as we drove to the dance.

We walked into the dance hall and noticed a sign-up sheet at the entrance table inviting people to sign up to call a dance. We learned that on the first Wednesday of every month, there is an open band and open calling. Dave signed up as caller number four and we sat down at the side of the hall to watch the musicians set up their instruments. I overheard a woman who was to be the first caller speaking nervously with a fellow dancer, “you have to help me if I get something wrong up there, OK?”

After the volunteer musicians had set up, she stood on the stage and told everyone to line up for a dance. During the walk through, she quickly discovered a mistake on the card that she was calling from, and from then on she looked more confident and called the next two dances without a problem. At that point in the night, there were five musicians: two fiddlers, two banjo players, and one guitarist.

The second caller was dressed all in black and she danced on the stage as she called out the figures in a sensual voice. As I sat out and watched her call, I noticed the climbing wall above the stage. The dance was held in the gymnasium of the Bloomington Harmony School. Someone who sat out next to me explained that with the semester over, there weren’t as many dancers as usual. Missing was the large crowd of beginners that the dance commonly attracted from the university.

The third caller wore a head set microphone and joined in the dancing while he called. His first dance was called “Highway Hypnosis,” an appropriate dance for Dave and I to do together, and we found it far more enjoyable than sitting in the car hour after hour. He called a dance by Tom Hinds next, named “Carousel.” During the first swing, my partner surprised me by leading me in a polka. During the next swing I moved to go into a polka again but he reprimanded me jokingly, “un-unh! Its going to be a surprise every time!” And it was—he had many creative ways of swinging, but my favorite was the polka and he would announce he was about to do it by yelling out “polka!” as we danced towards each other before the swing.

Dave was up next and he called two dances: Scouthouse Reel and Trip to Lambertville. Between them, as the musicians rearranged themselves, he made an announcement about our trip, talking of where we had been and where we had left to go. I noticed after he made the announcement that I became a much more popular dance partner; everyone had their own stories to tell us of the faraway dances they had visited.

The fifth and last caller called from an armchair on the stage. By this time the band had grown to hold four fiddles, two guitars, two banjos, and a percussionist, who began by playing the spoons. He later switched to a triangle, wood blocks, and various other instruments. During the last waltz, he adorned himself with a bib-like washboard and strummed along as Dave and I performed our standard final waltz.

-Bloomington, IL

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 8:22 am and is filed under 23 Indiana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.