Friday Night Dance

[polishin' them floorboards]


"Tonight the dance will be held in the bumper car pavillion..."
- fridaynightdance.org

There is a light, my friends, at the end of the hellish tunnel they call the 'beltway suburbs' -- that horrible place where youth, spirit, and dreams go to die. Yes, I'm talking about the upper-crust townships and neighborhoods outside of Washington, D.C., with their fiendish-sounding names, like Cabin John, Alexandria, and Manassas. And that light is the Friday Night Dance, held weekly at Glen Echo Park, an old amusement park built in the 1950s (or at least it looks like that's when it was built) just west of Georgetown.

The last time KB and I went to Glen Echo, it was a Sunday night, and also a contra-dance, and we ran into my cousin Amanda, the short-lived Nashville songwriting star, and her husband Jorge, who knows every Mexican on the Rte. 15 corridor. The young and the old (but mostly the old) come here dutifully, every week, to entertain themselves with a tradition that I'm sure will be gone in a generation or two, but like clockwork, resurrected when the next folk revival happens. And you better believe I'll be on the front lines, baby.

What I'm talking about, of course, is contra-dancing...

















["okay folks, let's line 'em up for 'jim's reel'..."]

From what I've been told, the "contra" does not refer to the practice of making two parallel lines in which each dancer faces opposite, or, in latinate languages, contra their partner, nor is it the jitterbug of choice for Central American rebels. Rather, "contra" is a New-England corruption of the word "country," as in "English Country Dancing." Just imagine a pilgrim child tugging on his mother's petticoats, and saying "Maw, what sorta contra is this'un we here've run a-shore-a?"

Now if you really want to know all the ins and outs and boring details about what contra-dancing really is, there's a variety of places to start: grandiose, thorough histories, an online bibliography of sources, including works by Goethe, Homer, St. Augustine, and Henry Ford, of all people (who knew the ol' Jew-bater could cut a rug?), a history of the pastime, as passed in the Connecticut River Valley, or maybe even this incredibly confusing chart, which introduced me to the term "fancy-stepping"...

...But if you'll take my word for it, contra-dancing is easily understood like this: All white people in the history of the world, no matter what their culture or country of origin, have, since Christianity, been trying to suck the fun out of dancing (which is essentially a vertical, non-procreative representation of sex, as we all know) by making young men and women dance in time to music using very specific, very tame dance moves, instead of properly expressing our natural instincts. Contra-dancing is what happened when Irish ceili dancing, which involves choreographed figures and lively music, Scottish country dancing, and English barn-dancing (a very popular form of entertainment, by the way), merged in America, and people started having wild hootenannies in Appalachian villages. This is how anglo-celtic peasants get down and do their thang. Pretty pathetic, right? Well, maybe compared to James Brown, but the music -- old-time string band music played on fiddles, guitars and banjos -- is awesome, and contra-dancing is a lot of fun.
















[old-timey]

The band playing at Glen Echo this past Friday night was the New Southern Cowtippers, who make a lot of bad "no cows were harmed in the making..." jokes on their website, but who play a good dance. They were a little quiet for my taste, but maybe that's just because they only had a one-man rhythm section and the banjo wasn't mic'd very well.

















[wanna arm wrestle?]

We danced about four dances before we were spent, because contra-dancin' ain't no joke. Above pictured is a "turn-with-your-left," one of the many moves shouted out by the caller, who stands by the stage and shouts out the moves to the complex dances that we did together. Other moves include "do-si-do," "alemagne," "gypsy," "left-hand-star," "pull-on-through," "promenade," and the ever-lampooned "swing-yer-pardner." By the end of the night, KB was dancin' like a pro, and me? Well, I was just sweating. Gotta start jogging again.

Another perk to Glen Echo Park is that the carousel was open...
















[we've come a long way, my steed]

For just a dollar, KB got to ride a pretty pony called Winifred! Imagine that!





















[yee-haw. or is it hee-haw?]

And of course, the last dance of the night was a waltz. If they had contra-dance proms in Kentucky (which would be awesome), the slow-dance at the end would be a waltz. It's tradition, after all.

















[save room for god, kids]