This was the first of these balls which hasn’t sold out, and there were people who’d been to the previous three who weren’t there. I don’t know if there was something going on in an overlapping community that took them away, whether the Playford workshop tired people out, etc – but I did notice that unlike last time, we had at least one set of Roger de Coverley that couldn’t self-organize and I had to walk through and prompt, so I think there were significantly fewer PEERS/Fezzi’s/Gaskell people. I was told that the recent heavy rains had hindered the Odd Fellows efforts at flyer posting / postcard distribution – so it’s hard to tell whether this is a blip. Anyway, 50 signups, which was enough to be having fun. I call without gender reference and say anyone can ask anyone to dance and anyone can line up on any side.
It seemed not a terribly waltzy crowd, so I ended up dropping most of the planned free waltzes and the first set no-teach Congress of Vienna – which is usually the teaser for a Congress of Vienna lesson during the first break – and then used no-teach Congress as the draw-people-in-from-the-break start to the third set (which was bandleader James’s good idea). With a slightly slow start – didn’t want to start a Sicilian circle with too few people, so several lightly-participated free waltzes while enough people got in – and a little more struggle than usual [there were a pair of quite young women who didn’t much want to let go of each other regardless of what everybody else was doing, weren’t responding to prompts at all, etc, and I eventually realized that there was nothing I could to to get them doing it right and if I ran the dances long enough for them to get it, the dance would never end] we were behind by the first break, but I managed to catch up for the second break, and had enough time to insert one more country dance from the alternate list (“Ore Boggy”) before “Sir Roger”, end with a free waltz, and end bang on time at 10:30.
Odd Fellows event committee – which I nominally chair but is very self-organizing – did a great job in handling registration, door, refreshments, set up, clean-up, and it is so nice to not have the same regular few BAERS volunteers burning out on these things.
— by Alan Winston