Intro
The event: Weave Your Heart in San Francisco, the 30th IAGSDC square dancing convention, at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis. Thursday July 3rd, 2013 through Sunday July 7th, 2013. Refresher: Gay square dancing of course has a higher proportion of LGBT participants than straight square dancing, but they've really become separate branches of dancing even though they're both based on the CALLERLAB "modern western square dancing" set of calls. Straight dances often have dress codes, and even when they don't straight dancers often wear the crinoline skirts and the "western" (1970s interpretations of 1950s interpretations of "western") shirts, and tend to be fairly staid events. Gay dances usually don't have a dress code so there are lots of people in shorts and T-shirts, big broad flourishes, a lot higher energy, and often a lot faster. But the lack of dress code doesn't mean that people don't feel free to dress up, so we planned out a few outfits along with a copious stack of T-shirts, socks and underwear.
We had been planning on driving over to the east bay, parking at a friend's house and taking BART in to the event, but the BART strike meant we sucked up the parking charges, drove in and parked at the 5th and Mission Garage. We arrived early Thursday morning, checked in (and the hotel gave us our room crack of dawn in the morning). Our original plan was to be crash test dummies for the Gay Callers Association caller's school in the morning and do floor setup in the afternoon, but Charlene was tired, so she crashed out in the room and I went down to help with floor setup.
Note for anyone doing floor setup and/or teardown: Kneepads (har har, yes, make sure you bring kneepads to the gay square dance convention) and gloves. The hand blisters have healed, the knees are still rubbed raw.
By the time Charlene came down for our afternoon work shift, the floors were all set up, so we went and caught the tail end of the caller's school callers. Based on the whoops and cheers I heard from earlier in that room I think we got the less confident beginners, but it was still a good warmup. Then walked down to the Whole Foods on 4th Street, bought dinner and snacks and breakfast for the cooler, came back and in the Trail-In Dance.
Pictures start here
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- Back in to the buses with the police escort where we got traffic slowed on the Bay Bridge for us to merge, on into Chinatown for a tip at Portsmouth Square.
- A stop at the city hall where we didn't have time for a tip (and Charlene and I stayed on the bus and chatted with the people around us 'cause we've seen that area).
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Late Friday night was the Honky Tonk Queen pageant, and we went, but weren't finding the drag as compelling as we've seen, and were tired, so we went to bed early, about quarter after midnight. We did, however, see enough to make us think that maybe there's some room for competition next year. Which brings us to...
We thought this would be a great venue for drag. We'd originally figured we'd dress up for the drag tip, but that was set up for when our club photo was. Then we thought about the Honky Tonk Queen competition, but Jet Roberts was calling a session before that, and faced with the choice between putting on a face and an outfit or dancing to Jet, Jet won.
So we decided to dress up for the Saturday evening banquet:
In the process of figuring out when we were going to wear these we went back and forth on shoes, and I ended up in 5¾" heels (4" rise), which I could walk in fine but couldn't dance in. So we went back to the hotel room, I switched into a dirndl T-shirt, Charlene into a tuxedo T-shirt, and we got nearly as many compliments on that little bit of cross-dressing as on the full-on make-up and dress outfits.
Sunday danced some more, I went to the intro to calling session, where I learned about the "chicken dance" and some techniques for organizing call structure and got some inspiration for how to learn the next steps, we went back down to do our stint as "hall monitors", but by quarter to six were worn out and decided to head home.
Roundup
But we will see y'all in Salt Lake City for Swarm The Hive next year, and in 2015 at Swing Me in St. Louis.
And I think the other caller we want to keep our eyes open for is Michael Kellog. Somewhere in there we had a session with a guy who called fast smooth choreography with a voice that rivalled Jet Roberts, I think it was Michael Kellog, and when the outsides don't twirl when the centers are calling through 'cause we want to catch our breath and there's a voice like that? Ooooh, baby.