The Journal Of The InnKeeper

Costume & Wardrobe Storage Solutions For Everyone

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 23:57:07 GMT

I keep getting asked about costume storage, and I'm rewriting the same answer over and over again in costume and cosplay groups, so I decided it was past time that I made an actual blog entry about this.

I have a lot of costumes. I mean, I have A LOT of costumes. And a lot of dance clothing. And dress-up clothes. And work clothes. Let's face it ... I just have a lot of clothing in general. When I still lived in an actual dwelling, I had a 2 bedroom apartment so that I could use my entire second bedroom as a walk-in closet. I don't mean that I wanted 2 bedrooms so that I could use both closets, I mean that the whole bedroom was one giant fucking wardrobe.

After moving into an RV, I needed some kind of long-term storage option for all my clothes. After a handful of years and some trial and error, I finally came up with a system that I really like. I'm very excited about my new storage system.

I found that 28 quart "under bed storage" bins have roughly the same volume as cardboard file boxes (also called "letter boxes" and "banker boxes"), which is what I was using to store everything in before (because they were uniform in size and shape and both big enough to be useful but small enough to carry and limit the contents for weight control).

Plus, because they're longer and flatter, I can put clothing in it with fewer folds, leaving them on hangers and in garment bags and just sort of "accordion-folding" them into the plastic bin. And the plastic holds up better than the cardboard. Also, I color-coded the bin lids. My costumes are all in white bins, my regular clothing is in silver lids, and my "not one costume, but a bunch of the same item" stuff like petticoats and corsets are in green bins.

The picture is a little bit outdated - this was taken before I added several more costumes and before I really nailed down the color coding, so it's not very consistent in this picture, but it got more consistent later on.

I have one bin per costume (or one costume per bin) with all of its bits including accessories and shoes (other than those costume elements I reuse in multiple costumes, like my petticoats). Each costume gets a checklist for all the items that belong to the costume, with the line items that are stored in that bin checked off and the "shared" items not checked off so that I know to look for them in another bin.

These checkists are in a plastic sheet protector and I use wipe-off markers to write on the plastic over the paper when I check something off for an event or to make notes, so I can just wipe it all off afterwards and still have a clean checklist.

And THEN, I have every single individual clothing item and element recorded in a free, online database that includes its location.

When I go to a con, I can just pick up the bin for the costume I want to take, check the checklist to see if there are bits located elsewhere, and I take the whole bin. If I am flying instead of driving, I take the garment bag containing the costume out of the bin and pack just the garment bag with the costume.

I made a template version of my database so that anyone else can use it. All you have to do is create a free Airtable profile, then click the link that takes you to my template, and "copy" that database into your own profile. From your profile, you can edit the database however you want.

I highly recommend this method or something similar. For my non-costume clothing that needs to be stored, I put all clothing items of similar type (i.e. "club tops", "work shirts", "suits & slacks", "pants", etc.) into these bins, tight-rolling them the way that flight attendants pack their clothing (tutorials can be found on YouTube for this very efficient and compact folding method). These items are similarly catalogued into my database so I can find them later. It's truly a space-saver that also protects my clothing from pests and the elements. It's also super useful for moving.

If you're looking for a better storage method of clothing and soft-goods, I recommend buying a bunch of under-bed storage bins and if you want to get really organized about it, some sheet protectors for checklists, some chalkboard labels for the outside of the bin, and some different color lids to color code. Then check out my wardrobe database template for boss-level organization.

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Country Swing Dancing And The Systemic Obliviousness Of Men - A Compliment Becomes A Metaphor

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 22:38:55 GMT

I was given a compliment that was definitely intended as a compliment and that I'm taking as a compliment and that, even though it includes a comparison, was definitely not intended to insult the person it was comparing, but nevertheless the compliment shouldn't actually need to exist and I'm using as a metaphor for a larger conversation on gender.

I have decided that there is actually a partner dance that I don't like: country swing. There are no patterns for the feet, it's literally a dance all about how fast and how frequently the lead can spin his partner (because gender norms). Now, dance involves the body so a dance style that doesn't focus on memorized step patterns can still be a legitimate dance style. But this is a dance style that is all about sequences of tricks with no concern for steps or musicality and relies on the strength of the lead to make the follow go where she is supposed to go.

And don't get me wrong but the really good country swing dancers do use step patterns and have musicality and the follows do as much work as the leads. But that's not the social dance experience. Usually it's a dude spinning the fuck out of some thin, young woman with no regard to how well it matches the music that's playing or whether she even knows how to do what he's making her do. Brute force will spin her and stop her without dropping her whether she knows what to do or not.

So, there was a guy at the wedding I went to recently who claimed to be able to two-step and swing dance. My sister grabbed him for a two-step and he was all over the place with her - no control, no musicality, just "slow-slow-quick-quick-spin-slow-slow-quick-quick-spin-spin-another spin-slow-slow-quick-quick".

When they sat down, he said that he was really rusty with the two-step and that he was better with swing. I would rather have danced a two-step with him, but since he said he was better at swing, I asked him to swing dance with me. So we got up and did a country swing exactly as described above - spin, spin, spin, who the fuck cares about beats and music?

I was told later that the dance with my sister looked pretty out of control and my mom was worried that he was actually going to hurt my sister, but she was amazed at how well I kept up with him. And I kind of downplayed it because 1) my sister was never as into partner dancing as she was into line dancing; 2) she hasn't danced in a while and I try to keep up with my dancing; and 3) I know exactly what "country swing" is and I know how to handle guys who dance like that.

So I've been feeling a little pleased that I impressed people by dancing with someone who had very little control and making it look like we were less out-of-control than we really were, mainly because *I* kept control of *me*. And it's legitimately not an insult to my sister, because he was the lead, so all problems were his fault. She's not even a poorer dancer than I am, necessarily, he was just that bad of a lead. I am, after all, a better follow than a dancer.

Here's the metaphor part: Too many cishet dudes are allowed to move through life like these country boys move across the dance floor - full tilt, without regard for their surroundings, who is around them, how they impact others on the floor, how out of control they are, dominating their partner, and with no regard to the mood of the music. And I have spent a lifetime developing the coping skills for how to keep my own feet underneath me when one of these guys swoops by and spins me around. And that's a compliment because it is, indeed, a skill that I've worked hard at and I am a good dancer (and "dancer") because of it.

BUT I SHOULD NEVER HAVE NEEDED THAT SKILL IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I should not ever be complimented for how well I can compensate for men's failings and flailings. Because men should not be allowed to stomp all over the floor and through life the way they do. But so many of them do so, that we just gave it its own dance style name and genre and said "yep, that's legit, that's how you do that!"

And we have done the social equivalent of tolerating and accepting men who do that in life.

Country swing is actually a really fun style to both watch and dance, *when done well*. But what *I* (and competition judges) think counts as "done well" and what social dancers think counts as "done well" are two very different things. It is, and should be, a legitimate style. But the way it's executed on a social floor is just fucking dangerous. It may be athletic, but it's not artistic, and it's not considerate. It's performative without being connective.

So don't be one of these country swing dudes. Pay attention to how you move through life, how you impact those around you, the space you take up, whether your partner is (or is able to) contribute equally to your partnership or are you just flinging them around with you, and for fuck's sake at least try to learn something about musicality because musicality is just emotional connection manifest physically. With a little math.

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The History of America Is The History Of Tap Dancing

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 05:03:36 GMT

Bringing me back to my high school theatre days, where I learned tap as a drama geek. Tap is intricately linked to the history and evolution of jazz music, which means that it's also intertwined with the history of swing dancing, a current love of mine. All dance is related in a twisty, convoluted, branchy evolutionary web much like actual evolutionary biology (although with multiple root points rather than one-ish), and all dance is related to music.

Because tap and jazz were the very first styles of dance that I learned, this is why I say that being a dancer is to be a musician. We are part of the music, making music, affecting the music. We weave in and out of the music like any other instrument.

And tap dancing is a study in racism and privilege that parallels the same study in jazz music - first the development by discriminated peoples and the blending of cultures, then cultural appropriation, then being discarded when no longer novel or when too "pure" for the white middle and upper classes to connect to.

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Why White Men Decided Dancing Is Unmasculine I'll Never Know

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 18:29:59 GMT

*sigh* Met a really cute NASA engineer who is also a very good swing dancer, and who has taken it upon himself to learn other styles of partner dance. I knew it would be too much to hope for that he was poly, but he *does* come from an area where another dancer recently came out as poly, so it might not have been *that* big of a fantasy.

Except he's ULTRA Christian.

Reason #46 why I hate living in Florida - unlike other similarly-sized metropolitan areas, the partner dance scene is conservative and religious so I can never hope to find potential dating partners who also know how to dance. At best, I might meet guys who are open to me teaching them some basic dance steps. Which is fine, I enjoy teaching and I enjoy sharing my passion.

But what it usually means in practice is that we end up breaking up before they ever get proficient at dancing and I don't have anyone to challenge *me* to get better; I never get to play the student so I never progress above my current level, which is advanced-beginner or maybe beginning-intermediate.

I have only ever dated one person who is as good (technically, he was better) of a dancer as I am, and we only danced maybe 3 times while dating.

Dancing is such a strong passion of mine that I feel a distinct black hole in my life that I don't have a romantic partner to share it with. I *did* have a couple of partners who were actively working on learning how to dance while we were dating, but for logistical reasons like distance, I never actually got to dance with them and, as I said, I don't have the opportunity to challenge myself.

Of all the things that white men could have decided wasn't "masculine" enough, they had to choose dancing. Y'know, that hobby that has strict gender roles where the man is in control and athletic and gets to hold women in his arms, and requires a good sense of rhythm and is guaranteed to attract the attention of just about every woman in the room? Yeah, that's not "masculine" enough for white dudes, so for generations, we dumped dancing as a culture until most white men are convinced that they can't dance and never developed an interest in it.

Yay fragile white masculinity.

However, in some religious circles, partner dancing is still encouraged. Mormons and that weird "progressive-conservative" southern Christian type still partner dance, so in this backwards superficially-progressive state if I want to dance, it's with people who have a strong religious faith. Which is fine for dancing, but pretty much rules them out as a potential dating pool.

"Orlando is really just a small southern town with delusions of grandeur." ~Joreth Innkeeper

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If You Want A Thing You Have To Actually Do The Thing

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 01:42:16 GMT

Dance Studios: We want more people to learn how to dance! And come to our dance parties!

Non-dancers: OK, well, we don't know how to dance and we're not really passionate about it, otherwise we would already be learning how to dance. So, how do we get into this dance thing?

Studios: Well, first spend hundreds of dollars on private lessons, and a couple of hundred on special shoes, spend several weeks in lessons and practice every moment at home, and then you can come to our dance parties where everyone there already knows how to dance!

Non-dancers: Uh, that sounds kind of intimidating. Don't you have, like, a group class somewhere that we can just drop in to see if we like it before we start spending all that money and committing every week?

Studios: NO YOU MUST COMMIT IF YOU ARE TO BECOME A *DANCER*!

Non-dancers: OK, well, we weren't really interested in becoming a Dancer, we just thought learning a couple of dance moves might be fun. You're the one asking for people to show up to your events.

Studios: *Fine*, we'll add a lesson at the beginning of our dance parties. We'll teach the same 3 steps over and over again for every dance party that we throw, and then we'll immediately open the dance floor to people who have been dancing for years and just throw you into the mix where you have to ask experts to dance with you and try to keep up with other experts moving around the floor. How's that?

Non-dancers: Yeah, didn't solve the whole "intimidating" problem. We'll just stick to asking our token dancer friend to show us a few moves, and then never practice them again.

#IfYouWantPeopleToDoYourActivityYouHaveToMakeItAccessible

Non-Dance Friends: Ooh, We've always wanted to dance! Will you teach us?

Dancers: Well, there are lessons available, and for safety you'll need suitable dance shoes.

Friends: We don't want to spend any money, so can you just show us some things?

Dancers: Well, you also need the space to do it, and that's my personal time that I'm giving up. Renting space costs money, and if I teach for a living, you're asking me to do my job for free. Plus, we already know that you need repetition to actually *learn* things. If you really want to learn how to dance, you need to practice regularly.

Friends: Nah, that's too much work and we're too busy with things that we prioritize higher.

[some time later]

Friends: Ooh, we've always wanted to learn how to dance!

Dancers: Well, there are lessons and dance events available...

#FromTheOtherSide #WeLoveToShareOurPassionButItTakesReciprocalEffort

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The Most Inappropriate Interaction I've Had At A Club

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 21:52:34 GMT

www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-inappropriate-interaction-you-have-had-at-a-club/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What is the most inappropriate interaction you have had at a club?

A. I've had 2 that I can come up with off the top of my head and they happened on the same night.

I was at a regular nightclub with some swing dancers, and towards the end of the night, everyone had left except for 2 guys I know. They were off dancing with some non-dancers they had met. I was approached by a guy who is not a dancer, but who was clearly drunk. He asked me to dance. He said that he saw me dancing earlier and knew that I was with a group of actual dancers, not your typical drunk club girl.

Now, partner dance etiquette is to accept dance requests, dance one song, thank your partner for the dance, and return to your place to dance with someone else. You can dance with them again later, but you don't dance multiple songs in a row because you don't want to monopolize anyone's time. I get that non-dancers are not aware of this, but I still do this even at nightclubs.

We danced one song and he was terrible. He was sloppy drunk and unable to tell that his clumsy manhandling of me was wrenching my shoulder. So I thanked him for the dance as soon as the song ended and I turned and went back to my spot. He followed me, demanding to know why I had left him on the dance floor. I told him about proper dance etiquette, and that he got his dance with me, now I was done. He backed me into a corner to prevent me from leaving and started arguing with me about dancing more with him.

Right about when I was getting ready to pull out my knife to get him to back off, one of my 2 dancer friends left saw what was happening and rushed over to grab my hand and pull me on the floor. The asshole shouted after me something about being a bitch for going to dance with someone else.

A couple of songs later, I got asked to dance by some other drunk guy. I accepted, and he attempted to hold me like he had seen the real dancers holding me, but as usual, he had no clue how to do it right. He held me way too close and his hands were way too low on my back. I started leaning away from him and he started holding me tighter. He tried to spin me in a clumsy spin, and when I came back from the spin, he grabbed me in a full-body embrace and kissed my neck.

I pushed him away and walked off the floor. He grabbed my arm to pull me back, but the other dance guy who was still there saw me and dove between us, putting me into a proper dance hold and whisked me away.

This second asshole tried to cut in, but my dance friend yelled back at him that I was "his" and he wasn't letting me go again. He quietly asked me how "friendly" he could be to make his point, and I gave him permission to be *very* friendly. So he put his hands on my butt and kissed me. Finally the asshole left.

I hate displays of possession, but the behaviour of these two jerks left us only 2 options - allow someone else to "claim" me so that they would respect my rejection, or escalate to violence. I chose the non-violent response first, and fortunately I did not have to fall back on the violent one.

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Yes You Really Can Do Exercises To Improve Your Non-Verbal Communicaiton Skills

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 21:25:01 GMT

A few years ago I wrote about a dance situation where I was sliding into a depressive state but putting on my best pretend-happy face (https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/387838.html). I went out dancing and met up with 2 friends that night - one dancer and one non-dancer.

The non-dancer and I had been having some incredibly intimate conversations recently and we were getting to know each other *really* well. He saw the effect that the endorphins had on me and thought I looked happy. I was smiling, outgoing, and having one of my best dance-skill nights where I was totally killing it on the floor. The non-dancer saw all of that and remarked on how happy I looked.

The dancer friend and I had not had that same level of intimacy and we only knew each other marginally well. But after one 3 minute song of full-body contact, he could see the depression behind the smile and the dance endorphins.

So now I want to give another example of how partner dancing gives people amazingly good non-verbal communication skills.

In 2019, I started a casual relationship with another dancer. We were becoming pretty good friends, but we still had some barriers up in the emotional intimacy department. We were having fun, but that's about it. But he's a fantastic lead and can build very good partnerships with his follows on the floor. I'll call him Michael.

We had not told anyone in our dance communities that we had been sleeping together. First of all, we weren't *dating*, so it felt weird to be making announcements about a casual relationship, but second, we are both community leaders and we didn't want to make things weird with overlapping our private and public lives.

Plus, he's ultimately monogamous and available for a dating relationship, so eventually he would want to find a romantic partner (probably from within the dance community) and having everyone already know that he's hooking up with someone else tends to make potential monogamous dating partners keep their distance. He would, of course, disclose to anyone to whom that information is relevant, but it didn't need to be public knowledge. Ah, the complex, twisty rules of mono culture.

I have another friend, who I'll call Anne, who is also a dancer. She and I have a similar level of platonic emotional intimacy - decent friends but still getting to know each other. Anne and Michael have their own friendship with each other, and it's possibly a closer emotional relationship than I had with either of them.

So, on this particular Wednesday night, I went to my usual dance event, and I met a guy there who was interested in using the venue. The manager wasn't there that night, so he wandered over to my event to make connections. So we chatted and I let him in on how our event was arranged and stuff. I'll call him Nick. I was feeling some chemistry between us, but I wasn't sure how much of that was real and how much was just because I had really good sex earlier in the day and I was still all after-glowey.

I found out that, in addition to Nick being a promoter, he's also a Latin dancer. So I invited him up to my DJ booth to pick whatever song he wanted and to dance with me. So we did and he's a fucking amazing dancer - one of the best I've ever danced with.

Earlier, he had given me his business card, offering to help me with promotion of our event. It felt like a pretty typical networking type of exchange. Later, while bent over my laptop looking at music (he also gave me a ton of his own music, so we were talking and exchanging files), he suggested I call him to get together and do more music exchange when we had time and more drive space, and he gave me his personal number.

Now, this could have gone either way. It could have been more networking, or it could have been a soft flirt to see if there was interest. I enthusiastically accepted his number, y'know, to exchange music. Then we danced. He said several times that he was impressed, given that I'm not a Latin dancer, I'm a Ballroom Latin dancer (which is different) and a beginner at that.

So I put on a bachata, which I like better than salsa, and we danced again. Then he mentioned another style of dance that I might like and when I asked him what it was like, we danced again. I was definitely feeling the chemistry. After the 3rd dance, the conversation lulled, and I excused myself to mingle with my other guests and friends. Here's the relevant part...

As I was walking across the rather large dance floor, apparently I was smiling. Anne and Michael were standing next to each other, both watching me (everyone had stopped what they were doing to watch me dance with Nick just a moment before). Michael remarked to Anne that I looked happy.

Anne, knowing that I often get trapped by men in uncomfortable conversations because a) I'm a woman at a nightclub and b) I'm the event host who has to make the rounds and talk to everyone, suggested the possibility that it might have been a tense smile. Keep in mind that I'm still a good 50-60 feet away and it's dark with flashing, disorienting lights.

Michael, without taking his eyes off me, said "no, that's a happy look". Apparently Anne glanced sharply at Michael as she realized that he was able to tell the difference between my happy smile and my pasted, polite but tense smile. She looked at him, looked back at me, back at him, back at me, and on the third glance back at him (all of which I could see as I walked towards them), she asked him if we were sleeping together.

Surprised, he looked at her, admitted it, and then asked how she knew. She said that the first clue was his knowing the difference between my smiles, and what confirmed it was the expression on his face as he watched me walk over to them and his relaxed posture, as well as my own body language while I walked towards them.

All of this happened in the span of time it took me to walk across the dance floor. When I arrived, I told them all about who the guy was and mentioned that I got his number. Michael said "see? Happy smile!"

So, here is someone I have been dancing with for months able to tell at a glance from across a *dark* room the difference between genuinely being excited about something and being polite to a new person and my general enthusiasm for the activity. Because he is getting to know me very intimately through dancing. The sex helps, but that's relatively new compared to how long we've been dancing together, and also sex is very contextual. Dancing expresses a lot of different emotions, and we can feel that with the music and the body contact. And here is someone else who I have *not* been dancing with but who has general non-verbal communication skills, and who *has* been dancing with the other person in this scenario so she knows *his* body language almost as intimately as I do.

He can read me, she can read him, and through our mutual connection with him and our general skills, she can infer my mental state too. Kind of like the dance version of metamours.

I know that a lot of people don't like dancing or think they're bad at it. But I can't stress enough just how valuable those skills can be in interpersonal relationships. I've known some people who are just naturally that intuitive, but I don't know of any other activity that people can practice that develops this level of intuitiveness and awareness of other people. This is an activity that can *teach* and *improve* exactly this kind of non-verbal communication and intuitiveness regardless of one's starting point in intuiting non-verbal communication.

I would like to encourage more people to try partner dancing, or at least to learn lead / follow exercises, to add one more *incredibly* powerful tool to their relationship toolkit.

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Bachata Makes Me Better At Blues Makes Me Better At Bachata...

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 21:38:11 GMT

I originally posted this on Facebook on April 24, 2019. I'm archiving it here so that I can look back over my progress in my dancing skills in the future.

LONG post about dancing -

I am not a blues dancer. I have never really enjoyed blues, compared to the other dances, because it's very spontaneous and there are very few rules to it. I don't improv well. I like ballroom because there is so much structure.

Even though they are also spontaneous in that, when you get out on the floor, the lead has to come up with the next pattern off the top of his head, and a good lead will match the pattern to the specific part of the music so that a good dance becomes a visual representation of the music itself, where the dancers ARE the music, the patterns are all existing patterns that we learn.

They have a vocabulary of patterns to choose from and I can learn and memorize those patterns so that when they throw one at me spontaneously, I already know what to do. And even if I haven't learned that particular pattern, the structure of the style of dance we're doing gives me guidelines to infer what my lead wants me to do.

Blues isn't like that. Blues just takes everything that the dancer knows from lindy hop, jazz, tap, Argentine tango, Charleston, and whatever else that particular dancer happens to know, and throws it all together with no *real* basic step (there kinda is one, but it's not helpful once you leave the basic and start improvising, whereas with ballroom, as long as you keep your feet moving to the basic, everything else will follow from there) and the follow dancer (me) not only has to interpret what the lead is trying to get them to do, but also has a lot of freedom to make up whatever shit the follow wants to do in the spaces between.

This is not my strong suit.

But then I got introduced to Bachata. Bachata is basically the Latin version of blues dancing. It's all that improv but arranged around an actual basic step, so there is my structure. And I got introduced to it first in a nightclub and then again at social events.

Learning how to do a street dance actually in the "streets", as opposed to taking lessons, is a different thing. It's a more organic feel. That makes it harder, for me, actually. But it's how I've learned almost all of my dancing once I took that first basic "social dance" course in college where the instructor taught a different ballroom dance every week. With that format, I didn't get a very deep introduction to anything, but I learned how to follow and I learned how to apply things I learned from one style to another, and I learned how to connect - how to connect with a partner and how to connect all the different dances together.

So I learned bachata, and in nightclubs, it's a very sensual, flirty dance. As opposed to in the classroom where it's very formal and stiff. And I fell in love with it. Through bachata, I get all the touch that I'm missing in my personal life with no local partners. After I learned how to just let go and lean into the bachata, blues suddenly got easier for me to connect with. It's still my least favorite of the dances, but I realized something last night.

My local FWB is a fantastic lindy hopper. He's also an instructor. We were talking last week about how we both feel stuck in this intermediate level because we both spend all of our time teaching newbies and never getting to dance with people who are better than ourselves, so we don't have much opportunity to advance further.

I want to be a better, more advanced dancer in general, and he wants to become a better teacher of advanced patterns (he is a better lindy hopper than I am, but I am proficient in more than a dozen different dances and he only really knows lindy and ballet, while he can fake it at a small handful of other lindy-adjacent dances).

So we got a little bit excited at the thought that he could practice teaching me more advanced moves which would help him improve his teaching style (since he usually teaches beginners and doesn't really know how to break down the more advanced stuff that he knows how to *do*, just not teach) and I could dance with someone better than me who could take the time to help me actually improve, not just throw something at me on the floor and hope that I grasp the concept in a 3 minute song well "enough".

With my love of bachata and not actually knowing any bachata dancers to dance with regularly (and not having the time to go to bachata clubs regularly), with my recent regular exposure to lindy hoppers who also do blues dancing, with now having made a dance friend who explicitly wants to learn how to teach better, and with starting up a sexual relationship with said dancer so I feel more comfortable being physically affectionate with him in general, I've been seeking him out for blues dances when I would have avoided blues songs in the past.
And although I am still not as improv-y and as fluid as people who connect with blues dancing, I am feeling more ... loose and experimental in my blues dancing.

One of my limitations is that I can do a lot of patterns, but I don't feel comfortable doing "flare". That takes a degree of confidence in one's dance knowledge and skill that I just don't feel. I don't know when is the right time to wrap my hand around my head and shoot it out and pose, for instance, because I don't feel very confident and I don't want people to see me doing something that screams "I know what I am doing!" when I clearly don't.

This has held me back in acting too - I keep not wanting people tho think that I really believe what I'm saying or doing. Like, I want them to know that *I* know that it's all make-believe. Which completely defeats the purpose of acting. So I am not a good actor.

Flare is something I could learn, I just haven't had the time to take any flare lessons and I haven't had any dance partners that were in a teaching sort of role (it's not generally considered appropriate to "teach" people in a social setting, especially if they don't ask for it first). But I did notice last night that I am relying less on maintaining the basic pattern as a "filler" when my partner throws something improv-y at me, and I'm allowing myself to "feel" the music the way that I always did when I danced solo in goth and industrial clubs.

My FWB dance partner says that he wants to learn how to break down the moves he does so he can teach other people, because he doesn't really know how he does them. He just connects to the music and he just *feels* it. That's also how I experience music, and dances like blues and bachata are the sorts of partner dances where you can really bring that connection into the partnership of the dance. You can in literally any style of dance, but the more fluid and improv-y the style is, the more connection you can bring, IMO.

He often dances with his eyes closed, so he can feel the music better. So our interpersonal connection has to be strong since he's not relying on visual cues but all physical touch and "energy" to communicate. And the event that I host is longer than normal events, so by the end of the night everyone is pretty fucking exhausted. I play more slow lindy and blues at the end of the night because it's all we have the energy to do, and everyone seems to appreciate being able to dance while also just kind of leaning on each other.

Wanting to be close to him because of our newish sexual connection, wanting to dance with him because he's just a good dancer, wanting to do the sensual street dances like bachata and blues because I'm a little bit touch-starved, wanting to improve my dancing skill, and being so energized by the music but so tired from the long hours that I really want to keep moving but can't quite keep up the same level of dancing as earlier in the evening, has all led to me doing a lot more blues dancing and seeing improvement.

So I told him last night that he was making me a better blues dancer, even though we haven't even started any explicit teaching sessions yet. Words of Affirmation is one of my Love Languages, and since that's a thing he wants to improve at, that compliment seemed to mean a lot to him.

The reason why I realized that I was becoming a better blues dancer is because of the new guy I met last night. He's one of the best Latin dancers I've ever danced with, and he threw all sorts of patterns at me that I had never even seen before, let alone done. I managed to keep up well enough to impress him, seeing as how I'm not technically a Latin dancer (I know mostly Ballroom Latin, which is kind of a stuffy version of Latin dances).

I threw in a bachata after we salsa'd, because I like bachata better than salsa, and afterwards he said that I should try Dominican Bachata if I like the slow bachata we did. I asked him why, what's the difference, and he said that Dominican Bachata is more ... just more. He couldn't quite explain it in the moment (I was expecting, like, an explanation of the basic pattern being different or something), so he just started doing it solo.

The music was not Latin at all, it was a lindy jump blues song. But he said that Dominican Bachata could be done to anything and somehow managed to make a Latin dance fit jump blues music without losing the Latin flavor but also looking like it went with the song.

So I watched him for a few bars, to see if I could pick up the basic pattern out of his fancy steps. And I couldn't, really, but bachata (the regular one I'm used to) is kind of a marching step and merengue is definitely a marching step, so I figured I could fake it, I screwed up the courage, held out my hand, and yelled "lead me!"

And he did.

I had no fucking clue what I was doing, but I blended lindy moves with merengue patterns and Latin hips while following his lead, and by the end of it, we were alone on the floor and everyone else was applauding.

And I credit my ability to do that to my increasing familiarity with blues dancing, thanks to my new FWB.

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I Challenge All The Men To Do This Core Strength Challenge

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:52:20 GMT

My challenge to all the men out there: Take this workout course:

I am not affiliated with this course or this company in any way. But as a dancer, I can recognize the value of an exercise routine built around the core strengthening exercise that's being used as the base exercise in this course. Here's the thing - men in general don't do a lot of exercises unless they are motivated to build muscle; men in general do not dance; men in general do not know how to do isolation movements; men in general do not work on their flexibility; men in general do not know how to loosen their hip muscles and end up being very rigid, causing joint pain later in life.

The reason why men in general don't do these things is because they have become associated with women and femininity. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had where men think that they all walk differently than women because of biology. While it's true that there are some "average" differences between the genders such as pelvic size and placement, our walks are largely learned, not inherited.

Here's something that a lot of my partners have been shocked to learn when the subject came up - you know that walk, the one on the runways and the one that women just do that men supposedly find so sexy? That walk was learned. We *learned* how to do it. We practiced it. Which is why some of us women do that walk and others don't - they didn't practice it. That is not a "natural" walk. It's what we learned how to do because it was prioritized. When I was a child, I wanted to be a model, so I spent hours walking up and down the hall practicing this walk. Men can do that walk too. But, like us, men have to *learn* how to do it.

A friend posted a male belly dancer video to my timeline - that's another thing that "men" seem to think that they just can't do, that it's inherently a female thing, that their bodies are just not meant to do that. And, like the walk, that's bullshit - people who practice it can do it and people who don't practice it can't. Your individual ability to do those movements is a combination of your *individual* biology (not your gender biology) and all the physical choices you have made over your entire life, conscious or otherwise, that led to today. If you did not spend your life practicing isolation movements, you will have difficulty moving like a belly dancer.

But it's never too late to start trying.

Learning this particular motion, learning how to isolate your muscle groups, building core strength, improving your cardio, and improving rhythm are also all incredibly helpful techniques for improving your skill in sex. Just FYI. I don't care how good you think you are in bed, you can always get better. And as a straight woman who has sex with men, let me tell you - your lack of ability to isolate your core muscle groups have been noticed and is holding you back.

So, I challenge every man on my friend's list to take this course. Not for weight loss, although you will probably experience some of that. But because you have all been told a pack of lies about who you are as people that has led to a physiology that is less flexible, less strong, with less mobility and poorer health FOR NO FUCKING GOOD REASON.

Dance, core strength, muscle isolation, flexibility, and a robust cardiovascular system are about as masculine as it gets. They're about strength. They're about confidence. They're about control. They're about power. And they're attractive to a lot of straight women. That's everything that you've been told that heteromasculinity is about, and yet y'all avoid doing the very things that would accomplish these goals.

I don't even care if you "don't like dancing" or "have two left feet". You never have to get good at this, and you don't have to come to love it. I challenge everyone to complete one month-long challenge using this core exercise as its base. If you like it, great, stick with it and see what else they have to offer. If you don't, find another exercise to challenge yourself with at the end of the month.

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What Is The Benefit To Learning Dance?

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:22:36 GMT

www.quora.com/Why-should-you-learn-ballroom-dance-or-any-dance-and-is-there-any-benefit/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Why should you learn ballroom dance or any dance and is there any benefit?

A.

Dance is a great form of exercise that includes both cardio and flexibility work.
Dance is a great form of social activity to meet new people and build friendships and community.
Social partner dancing has been shown to decrease or relieve the symptoms of some forms of dementia and to also reduce the onset of dementia (https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcseriesblog/2016/04/04/keep-dancing-turns-good-brain/).
Partner dancing increases your awareness of the space you take up and your effect on those around you, so it can help build empathy skills.
Partner dancing improves non-verbal communication skills, which help in other areas of life such as romantic relationships, work relationships, familial relationships, customer service, etc. (I teach a workshop where I teach non-dancers certain dance exercises that will teach them non-verbal communication skills to improve relationship communication with no dancing even required!)
Social dancing offers clear guidelines for social etiquette, that can help improve self-confidence or relieve social anxiety, and can offer a framework for social etiquette in other contexts.
Social dancing builds self-esteem as skill improves and as the dancer practices the social etiquette of asking for dances and dealing with rejection. It builds emotional resiliency.
Dance brings awareness to the physical body, which can help with self-esteem, and with awareness of the body that can lead to better detection of problems and better self-care.
Dancing can be a safe outlet for physically expressing and processing strong emotion.
A regular dance regime or schedule can provide a sense of structure while combining physical activity and artistic or creative expression, all of which are extremely valuable tools for children and young adults for building and maintaining healthy self-esteem and productive patterns that can be applied in other areas of life, and for people in any life stage who may be experiencing emotional upheaval, loss, change, or feeling unsettled or adrift through changing life circumstances, or who just might need or want an anchor or a steady point in their life.
Partner dance is also great for mitigating the effects of touch-starvation, which a lot of people, straight men in particular, are brought up with very few outlets for non-sexual touch once we reach adulthood. This is a wonderful way to get some of the physical touch that we seem to need as human beings.

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Dance Floor Etiquette

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 23:16:04 GMT

www.quora.com/What-are-some-unspoken-rules-of-the-dance-floor/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What are some unspoken rules of the dance floor?

A. There aren’t really any “unspoken” rules, there are etiquette guidelines that most people are willing to talk about if anyone brings it up, and some guidelines that are explicitly talked about in classes. Which are which, however, depends on where you are. Some instructors remember to talk about floor etiquette and some don’t.

Basic etiquette includes things like:

paying attention to the amount of space you’re taking up and how your presence affects other people,

yielding the floor to avoid collisions,

inviting people to dance with you without pressuring them,

accepting rejection gracefully,

offering rejection gracefully,

not hogging anyone’s attention by dancing several songs in a row with them and allowing them to dance with others or not dance if they choose not to,

no food or drinks on the dance floor,

not smoking near the floor (or indoors, depending on local laws),

good hygiene,

proper shoes and attire to protect the floor, yourself, and other dancers,

matching dance style and skill to your partner, particularly the more advanced dancers simplifying down to match less advanced partners and paying attention to differences in body size and shape and ability,

thanking your partner for the dance at the end of the song and the person who did the asking ought to escort the other back to where you found them, or if partner-changing is happening quickly, at least acknowledge the goodbye with a nod, handshake, hug, high five, etc.

Follow the line-of-dance and/or spot dancing rules, especially when there are a mix of dance styles happening at the same time.

There may be others, but they all boil down to courtesy and accountability. Be courteous to those around you and be accountable for your actions.

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Which Dances Are Ballroom Dances?

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 23:02:17 GMT

www.quora.com/How-can-you-describe-the-different-types-of-ballroom-dances/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. Which dances are considered "ballroom dancing"?

A. That depends on who you ask. You have to clarify if you mean dances that are accepted under the International Ballroom Dancing competition standards, or the American Smooth / Rhythm Dance competition standards, or the kinds of dances are taught in ballroom studios, or any social partner dancing?

Very generally speaking, “ballroom” refers to a collection of partner dances that include smooth style European dances, Latin dances, and rhythm dances, some of which can be danced socially, and some of which really are only danced in choreography because there are too many times when the contact necessary for communication of the next step does not exist (such as side-by-side moves, or moves at a distance).

In addition to this, there are often several distinct dance communities in any given region in the US. The “ballroom” community might do all (or a large number of) the dances, but there is also a separate community for each of the swing dances (usually lindy hop, which sometimes includes balboa and blues, west coast swing, and shag as their own communities), a separate community for Argentine Tango, and a separate community for salsa (which sometimes includes bachata and occasionally kizomba), and the country western dances (which can include two-step and one-step, as well as country-swing, country cha cha, square dancing, and line dancing, although sometimes square dancing is its own community all by itself) - all of which might do a slightly different version of those dances from the same styles danced in the ballroom community.

I recently started keeping a running tally of all the partner dances that are currently danced somewhere in the US, and so far I’ve come up with 34 specific styles (if I lump the 3 main Shags under one heading), but this is a work in progress as I keep adding dances as I am made aware of them:

www.facebook.com/notes/joreth-innkeeper/all-the-partner-dances/1612515565470846/

For more info, you can read about different kinds of dances here:

Music & Videos - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal - https://sites.google.com/site/orlandoballroomdance/resources/music-videos

Ballroom dance - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballroom_dance

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How Many Dance Steps Can You Do?

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 20:53:04 GMT

www.quora.com/What-dance-steps-can-you-name-off-the-top-of-your-head-How-many-of-them-can-you-actually-do/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper

Q. What dance steps can you name off the top of your head? How many of them can you actually do?

A. This reminds me of that scene in My Cousin Vinny where Marisa Tomei is on the stand and the prosecuting attorney is challenging her to tell him the correct ignition timing for a particular car and she keeps saying that she can’t answer the question and the attorney reacts as though he caught her in a lie, that she doesn’t actually know enough about cars to be an expert witness. So the judge finally interrupts and says “WHY is it a trick question?” and she goes on to explain that the car he’s demanding to know about doesn’t exist so she can’t give the correct ignition timing for it.

What do you mean by “dance steps”? And in what style of dance? This question isn’t really asking for a thing that exists without some kind of clarification.

At last count, I could name 34 specific partner dance styles,

I have at least tried 23 partner dance styles and 3 choreographed dance styles, not counting line dances (I haven’t the foggiest how many of those I have tried) and I can do 15 of them with some proficiency. Each of those partner dances has a “basic” step, but each of those “basic” steps are totally different from each other. So, do I know 1 step or 23 steps if we’re just counting the basic step?

In all of the partner dances, they have so many steps that I don’t think all of them have been categorized. You may be able to find a list of specific patterns allowed in competition for each of those partner dances, maybe, but a lot of patterns are not allowed in competition, are “street” variations, or are made up on the spot by individual dancers. And most of those don’t have names to them. Or have different names from different people.

Now, even if we just take the 15 partner dances I can do with some proficiency, I couldn’t possibly be able to list off all the individual patterns I can do in each of those 15 styles. I have no idea how many patterns (or steps) I know. I’m a follow, which means that my dance partner comes up with the step that we’re about to do and non-verbally communicates to me what I’m supposed to do. So, basically, I know as many patterns in each partner dance style as all of my dance partners ever in my history of dancing and in my future know how to communicate to me how to do.

That’s a lot of steps.

Then we move to the 3 choreographed dance styles that I know - Bollywood, Jazz, and Tap. Each of those styles also has their own repertoire of steps, some of which are catalogued and some of which are made up on the spot or are regional variations.

Again, I couldn’t even begin to list how many of those steps I know. I have probably forgotten more steps than I could remember just sitting here thinking of them (and I probably never learned their names), but if someone does one of the steps and I try to copy it, I’ll probably remember it.

Next we get to the types of “steps” that get randomly thrown into social freestyle dancing where a dancer could dance the entire song just doing that one step (twist, mashed potato, the jerk, etc.) or they could be mixed and matched in a collaboration of freestyle dance moves at a nightclub or dance event. I currently specialize in 1950s-1960s dances and solo charleston, and I spent many years as a goth dancer in goth and industrial nightclubs. Once again, there are so many steps for each style of dance, many of which were never categorized officially or named and some of which are just made up on the spot, and most of which were borrowed from and built on other dance styles, that I couldn’t even start counting them all.

(Goth dance “steps” are particularly fun and are often given satirical names like “Kick The Smurf” and “Change The Lightbulb” and “Start The Lawnmower” and “Pick Up The Dollar Bill On The Ground” and “Pluck The Apple From The Tree And Admire It” and “Stuck In My Coffin”.)

And then there are the line dances! Most country and urban line dances have a tendency to reuse the same handful of steps just in different combinations - things like the grapevine, the jazz square, the charleston, stomps, kicks, heel-toes, ball changes, etc. Pretty much all of these steps exist in one or more of the other styles of dance, such as jazz, ballet, tap, and even some partner dances like cha cha, country two-step, and more. So there is probably a heavy overlap between what steps I know in line dancing and what steps I know in other dances.

But since there is no over-reaching Catalogue Of All Dance Steps somewhere, and many steps are made up on the spot, there’s no way for me to know all of the steps that I know. For a lot of steps, I don’t know that I know it until I do it, and then I can think “oh, right, this is THAT step!” Most of the steps or patterns that I have learned, I was not taught the name of that step, just how to do it.

So the closest I can come to answering this question is by saying that I know 24 partner dance *styles*, 15 of which I know with some degree of proficiency, 3 choreographed styles, 1 of which I know with some degree of proficiency, and so many line dances that I never even bothered to keep track.

If I had to guess, I probably know at least a dozen specific patterns or variations (dance “steps”) for each of the dances I know with some degree of proficiency and at least 3 patterns or “steps” for each of the dances I have at least tried. There is some overlap. Add that to the freestyle dance “steps” and the line dance steps, if I just estimate or round my numbers and say, maybe that I know about 10 specific steps for every style of dance I know (partner and choreographed) with about 1/3 overlap plus the freestyle solo dance steps, I would hazard a guess that I probably know more than 2 or 3 hundred individual patterns or “steps”.

Now, if I was a choreographer or a Gold level competition dancer, I would probably know an order of magnitude more.

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Can Guys Be Lifted In Dancing?

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:09:41 GMT

Q. Is it necessary that the dance lift was performed by a male partner? My girlfriend offers me to dance too, but I never played sports, unlike her.

A. First of all, partner dancing has nothing to do with lifts. People go their entire lives as partner dancers without ever doing a single lift, especially if they are social dancers. If your girlfriend wants to dance with you, you don’t have to know lifts to do it.

In fact, you **won’t** learn lifts for a very long time, because they’re dangerous and require skill. Lifts are not for beginners. The first thing you’re going to learn is just where to put your feet on which beat and where to put your hands. And you’re going to do a LOT of that, for a very long time, even if you want to eventually learn lifts.

Partner dancing does have a history of very strict gender roles. But fortunately, we live in an era where we can challenge those roles, and the dance world has been challenging them for ages now.

Anyone can lift anyone in dancing, just like anyone can take either the lead or follow role. Do the roles that you want to do.

Although I will point out that having once played sports is not relevant to who does the lifts. Proper lifts are all about leverage, momentum, and balance, not necessarily brute strength and definitely not about the kinds of movements that other sports use. There are a few moves that require brute strength, but most lifts use leverage more than anything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfUcmYcZ4pw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOe9r2RlE4c

A lift is not about a strong person throwing a small person around. Both people are using core strength to do a lift. The lifted person is engaging all of their own strength and flexibility too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3AH7W1YFTY

Dance is a partnership between two equal and complimentary partners, even when staying within traditional gender roles. The follow still has to come to this partnership as an equal and perform their role. In lifts, that’s as much athleticism as the person being their base, sometimes more.
If you want to be the person being lifted because you think your girlfriend is more athletic than you, you’re in for a big surprise. As the person being lifted, you have to have musicality, timing, flexibility, and strength in the legs, arms, and core.

Being lifted isn’t just about being small, and it’s definitely not about being weak. Check out YouTube videos on core exercises for dance lifts - you’ll see nothing but workouts for 6-pack abs because being lifted requires an enormous amount of core strength. Honestly, the leads (or bases) have the easier part of the job in lifts.

So, by all means, go out there and learn lifts! Be the person who is lifted if you want! Just know that A) once you start taking lessons, you will not get to the lifts for a very long time and B) if you still choose to be the person being lifted, that will require a great deal of athleticism that C) has nothing at all to do with other sports so skills in other sports will not help you here.

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No-Tie, No-Loop, Adhesive, Double-Layer-Filtered Pandemic Mask (disposable)

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 17:53:35 GMT

I've had enough people ask me now how to make my adhesive masks that I'm making a tutorial. At the moment, I don't have pictures of me constructing the mask, so I will add those later, perhaps the next time I make one. But I can write out the instructions. I have been putting it off because I want to make a video, so I'll add that later too, when I get around to it.

I have chosen an adhesive mask that creates a full and complete seal all the way around for better control of the air leaving my mouth (no air leak up into my eyes or glasses!), and a "beak" shape that creates a pocket in front of my mouth that makes it feel easier to breath. I wear this mask while dancing for several hours and I can breathe fine in it. If Disney employees can dance around in a full fur suit, I can certainly handle social dancing and grocery shopping in a cloth mask.

The adhesive is intended for use on human skin and during athletic activity, so it stays on even while sweating and heavy breathing and I have no reaction to the adhesive. I do tend to wash my face around my nose and mouth afterwards, though, because the moisture from my breath being trapped around my face makes me feel like my skin is getting oily, but I have not seen any irritation or abrasion or even acne or skin blemishes from wearing this mask regularly.

Items you will need:

Kinesiology Athletic Tape
Some kind of filter material
- coffee filter
- tissues
- toilet paper
- air filter for your air conditioning unit
Scissors

If you're feeling particularly crafty, you can also get a hot glue gun and some hot glue, and some other decoration. I'll include a picture at the end of a red mask I made with some black lace over the top.

The first thing you'll want to do is choose your filter material. This mask is not rated for anything, even if you use some kind of rated filter material, so you need to think of it as being approximately as safe for the people around you as a standard cloth or surgical mask. It is probably safer because of the seal around the mouth and the filter material, but because it has not been tested and approved for anything, you ought to treat it as if it's only as effective as the standard masks.

So you can choose your filter material to be out of anything you want. I mainly decided to create a filtered mask because I needed something in the middle of the adhesive to keep it from sticking to itself. It turns out that air filters for home air conditioning units are often the same price regardless of size - the price is determined by the level of filtration.

So I bought the highest HEPA-rated filter I could find, which included anti-viral filtration, in the largest size available. This may or may not still be effective once it's applied in the mask, so this is why you should treat the mask as if it's a standard mask.

Anyway, you can buy an air filter and get a TON of usable material. Combined with the cost of a package of athletic tape, I estimate my masks to cost me roughly 50 cents per mask. If you are using an air filter, you will need to separate the filter material from the frame. This can take some work, and there are YouTube videos out there showing how to do this.

Basically, you need to cut the chicken wire off of the face of the frame (on both sides) and then cut the filter around the edge to separate it from the cardboard frame. It's simple to do and regular scissors will cut the wire, but the wire is sharp and can poke or cut you while you're working, so take care with this step.

Once your filter material is free of any packaging, you can work with it to make masks and you can store the excess (if any) in a plastic bag for the next mask. If you choose to use coffee filters or tissue or any other filter material, this preparation step should be significantly less work.

So, now that you have your filter material and it's ready to be worked, you can start constructing your mask. Next you will need to prepare your athletic tape.

Kinesiology tape tends to come in 2-inch strips or rolls. Some brands of the tape come pre-cut into roughly 10-inch lengths. Most of them include a grid on the back to use as a cutting guide. I found that the pre-cut strips fit me well if I shortened them by about 4 squares (approximately 7-8 inches). This will take some experimentation on your part.

I can wear a mask with a pre-cut strip that has not been shortened at all, but I like it better at around 7-8 inches in length. I have a very small face and I fit most large children's size things. Average people will probably fit fine into 2 10-inch strips "standard" version. Larger people may need to to use the un-cut rolls and make it longer and/or with 2 1/2 or 3 strips instead of 2.

So choose your tape color and determine the length you need.

Now that you have your tape and your filter material, we can begin the instructions:

Take 2 strips of tape of the appropriate length. Peel back the adhesive backing along the length of one of the strips by about 1 square (1/4 inch). Place the other strip face down onto the now-exposed adhesive, overlapping the two strips and creating a double-width band of tape just shy of 4 inches wide.
Remove the backing from both strips and place face down on a surface with the adhesive face up.
Cut 2 strips of the filter material, one smaller than the other. The larger strip should be approximately the dimensions of your double-wide mask, minus about a quarter inch all the way around (so, if your mask is 4" x 10", you'll want a piece of filter material approximately 3.5" x 9.5" - this does not need to be exact and it can be a rough cut. The important part is that one piece is bigger than the other and the bigger piece is smaller than the whole mask). You can also choose to have only 1 layer of filter. In this case, make your filter to the "larger filter" dimensions.
Place the smaller filter in the center of the double-wide strip, right on the adhesive. Place the bigger filter over it and press down around the edges that are touching the exposed adhesive. If you go with only 1 layer of filter, you only need to do this step once - place the filter in the center of the adhesive, leaving about 1/4" of adhesive exposed all the way around.
Now you should have a rectangle of athletic tape with a patch of filter in the middle and a strip of exposed adhesive all the way around.
Carefully fold the mask in half, so that the short ends meet each other (but don't touch!). Along one long side only, press the exposed 1/4" inch of adhesive edges together to create a seam. This forms your "beak" shape. It looks kind of like one of those simple leather or duct tape wallets kids make at summer camp.
Now, with that seam on the bottom / front, going from your chin to your beak's "nose", place the beak over your mouth and nose and press the rest of the exposed adhesive over the bridge of your nose and smooth down your cheeks.
You can choose to leave your chin free of adhesive, so that air escapes out the bottom if you want to get a straw inside to drink (this basically makes it about as protective for others as a surgical mask with its gapping around the face) or you can seal the adhesive all the way around your face.

Leaving a gap at the bottom will also make it cooler, so I tend to do this after I've finished dancing, when I'm back at my table, to cool off and to drink water, but I close up the seal at my chin when I'm interacting with other people.

So that's it! Once you get the hang of it, it's really simple and only takes a few minutes.

Current recommendations are that disposable masks should be replaced about once a day or if it gets wet while reusable masks should be washed at least once a week - for those not in the medical field and only using them in moderate settings.

I tend to wear mine for about a week, using the reusable washing guidelines, because these are so much heavier duty than typical disposable masks and I generally only go to the grocery store and to my office. I tend to make a brand new one on the very rare occasions that I go dancing with my established dance partner. I do not recommend making these ahead of time because you expose the adhesive during the process, which will decrease the length of time you can wear one.

To reuse it, I keep the strip backings. Then, when I take my mask off, I fold the backing strips in half, and I insert them into the mask, with the fold of the backing tucked into the fold of the mask. They end up crossing each other like an L or a V.

Then I press the mask flat with the backings between the layers to keep the adhesive from sticking to itself, and store it until I need it again.

After about a week of wear, the adhesive stops sticking consistently. My record so far was 6 days of 8-hour use with 1 evening of dancing (and sweating) in the middle of that run. It now takes me about 10 minutes or less to make a mask (depending on if I have to cut off more filter from the pack or if I have some strips already pre-cut). I was also able to wear a mask that I had made probably 3 or 4 days prior so it was sitting open for several days. I did this for testing purposes, so I recommend changing your mask more frequently.

Here are some pictures of me in the mask:

And here is a picture of my red and black lace version:

This was made the same way, but before I removed the backing to add the filter, I added the lace. I found a 2-inch black lace ribbon that I liked. I cut 2 strips the same length as the athletic tape and placed it over the top of the tape. Using my hot glue gun, I glued the lace around the edges and along the center seam.

To hide the glue, I also took some strips of black sequins and hot glued that all the way around the edge and along the center seam. This held up during several hours of dancing and in a combination of temperatures, which can stress hot glue. If you use a fabric or material that is at least 4 inches (or wider than the mask), then you only need to glue around the edges, not along the center overlap seam.

Once the glue was dry, I completed the steps starting with step #3, adding the filter and folding the mask into shape.

Adding the lace and sequins really classed up the mask. I could see doing this with a variety of colors of lace, or just sequins, even individual sequins in a pattern all over instead of a ribbon strip. But the bare tape in a variety of colors is pretty festive all on its own too.

And here is a short video of me dancing in the first mask I made:

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Movie Review: Cuties

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:45:27 GMT

I just hosted a Brat Pack drama marathon. It was 3 of the movies that literally define the Brat Pack. David Blum, a reporter for the New Yorker, started out writing an article about Emilio Estevez shortly after St. Elmo's Fire. One night, Estevez invited Blum out to hang out with most of the cast, as they often did. Blum changed the focus of the article to the whole group and called it Hollywood's Brat Pack.

I grew up in the '80s with the Brat Pack as my role models. I watched a lot of movies in the '80s. If it hadn't been for my love of books and music, I very much could have been Xavier Cross from Scrooged with how much television I watched as a kid. Those Brat Pack movies, though ... Most of what I enjoyed in the '80s did not age well. I go back to watch the classics now as an adult and I'm really kind of horrified, if I'm being honest. I still love my old movies, though, because nostalgia is one helluva drug - forget about beer goggles, you oughta try on rosy nostalgia glasses sometime!

Anyway, the media I consumed as a kid was ... well ... rough. It was hard. It was deep. Frankly, it's no wonder that GenXers are pretty fucked up. The Outsiders, Stand By Me, Old Yeller, Neverending Story ... I'm still not over Artax's death. We grappled with some shit back then.

I also read a lot, as I mentioned. One of my favorite authors back then was one of the most popular authors of the time - Judy Blum. She tackled some pretty hard stuff too. Her coming of age novels were grounding. I remember the controversy over her 1975 novel, Forever. That book examined both suicidal depression and teen sex. Talk about heavy topics. In the story, the main character has premarital sex at the end of high school, believing she will be with her partner "forever", but in the end [spoiler alert] discovers that one's first love rarely lasts forever and she will move on from him.

The fact that the characters have sex as teenagers and do not end up married, and the main character uses birth control, makes this book come in a whopping #7 out of the top 100 "most challenged books" in the US, for how often it gets censored and banned.

I bring all of this up to talk about Cuties.

I finally watched the movie Cuties. I've been defending it and haven't even watched it yet. So I decided that if I must watch something before I criticize it, then I must also watch something in order to defend it. So I did. To be totally honest, absolutely nothing I have read, both pro and con, accurately explained to me what Cuties was about.

[SPOILER ALERT - The entire plot of the film follows]

Amy is an 11 year old Muslim girl growing up in France. Her family is, by my standards, extremely repressive. She is required to cover her body and hair, and pray for piety and modesty. She is moved into a new apartment and, presumably, a new school, where she meets the Cuties - 4 girls who have formed a dance team of that name.

These girls show their skin and defy authority. They are rebellious and obnoxious, but really not any worse than all the kids I knew at that age. Their first act of rebellion is to convince the entire schoolyard to pose and freeze one day when the bell rings to summon them back to class. I mean, that's hardly dangerous or scandalous. Just irritating to the authority figures.

After some routine bullying, Amy eventually gets accepted by their group and starts hanging out with them. She starts wearing less modest clothing, but again, nothing worse than anything I did at her age. She shows her legs and her midriff. I probably still have some of my old crop tops from the '80s. I have always been proud of my stomach and I liked showing it off.

As for legs ... well, I grew up in an era of knee-length shorts and I am still uncomfortable in anything shorter (although I have no problem with *skirts* that short, but shorts have to be to my knees). So let me tell you sometime of the nearly impossible task of finding shorts for women or girls that don't have half my ass hanging out. I literally have to wear men's shorts in order to find any long enough to make me comfortable. Girls wear short shorts because that's what's readily available.

Anyway, so the girls are dressing less modestly than Amy's Muslim family would like. But not any less modestly than any tweens I have seen since ... oh, probably the '60s. In fact, the tight mini skirts we see the Cuties in when we are introduced to them look suspiciously like the skirts I had back in the '80s. In the '90s, one of those mini skirts literally got me my first mall job when I was 16 - my boss liked my ass in that skirt and wanted to watch me reach up and straighten the suit jackets in that skirt all shift.

So, the Cuties have heard of some dance competition and they want to enter. So they rehearse all the time. All of their routines that we see are pretty standard hip hop routines - nothing particularly special or controversial. No twerking or crotch-splits or anything.

Amy wants to join their dance troupe, but she has never danced before. So she steals her older cousin's mobile phone to watch the practice videos the Cuties have uploaded so far and searches the internet for music videos to learn by. Unfortunately, she finds videos of voluptuous women in thongs twerking. So, guess what kind of moves she learns?

Here's the thing ... the right-wing propaganda of this film is totally wrong of course. It has nothing to do with pedophilia or sex trafficking or child prostitution. It is, of course, a criticism of the oversexualization of young girls, just as the producers and directors say it is.

But the defenses of the film led me to believe that it was a criticism of *the dance industry* and how *it* oversexualizes girls. But that's not true either.

The Cuties are not part of any dance studio or dance industry. They're 4 tweens (and Amy) who want to be famous dancers who emulate what they see in pop media. With, as far as I can tell, absolutely no adult supervision or guidance. Certainly no *pressure* to dance this way.

Amy's mother has no idea what she is getting up to. She has 2 small children to care for and a husband who is off somewhere courting a second wife (without telling her about it until it's a done deal). I'll get back to this in a minute. The only time we see Angelica's family is when she and her brother get into a fight and her dad yells that he's trying to sleep ... in the afternoon. We see Yasmine's mom, who seems nice enough, but clearly has no clue what the girls are getting into. None of the other girls' parents ever enter the picture.

So Amy, desperately trying to fit in, learns these very adult dance moves on her own. Then, when Yasmine gets kicked out of the group, and the group freaks out because the preliminaries for the dance competition are too soon to teach another girl the routine, Amy jumps in, proves that she's been studying their home videos and already knows the routine, and also introduces the other girls to the very adult dance moves she has also been studying.

These moves get incorporated into their routine. This routine wins the girls a spot in the competition during the primaries. When they get caught sneaking into a laser tag facility, Amy gets the girls out of trouble by explaining that they are dancers and celebrating their acceptance to the competition. To prove that they are really dancers, she starts doing the adult dance moves, making the two male employees so uncomfortable that they just let the girls go. The girls don't realize that the men were uncomfortable and trying to get out of watching tweens twerking, they think Amy just convinced the guards that they are legitimate dancers which, for some reason, gave them a free pass.

As they practice for the competition, Amy becomes more and more self-confident. She starts wearing even more revealing clothing and moves through her school with the same arrogant attitude as the other Cuties. Later, she picks a fight with a rival dance team, who manage to pants her and take pictures of her in her underwear to post on social media, mocking her for her childish undergarments.

Amy, filled with lots of really big emotions at this stage in her development and with her oppressive home life and her humiliation on behalf of her mother for her father bringing home a new wife, starts making really bad choices. She steals lots of money from her mom's purse and takes her friends and her brother on a shopping spree for more adult underwear and clothing.

Amy's mom eventually learns of the theft and freaks out, yelling and hitting Amy for getting out of hand. She even calls in a priest to do an exorcism, but the priest says there are no demons there. So Amy's mom and grandmother strip her and splash her with water, having earlier established that water washes away sins. Amy goes into a kind of trance-like convulsion partially consisting of some of her booty-shaking new dance moves.

Later, when her cousin discovers that she still has his phone and tries to take it back - her one connection to this grown-up, outside world of music videos and social media - Amy locks herself in the bathroom and takes a picture of genitals. I am unclear on if the picture includes her new adult underwear or not. The film shows her taking the picture but does not show us the picture (thankfully). She then posts this picture on social media.

Now her new friends hate her because she went too far. They call her a whore and say that they are receiving harassing messages to show off their private parts like Amy. So they kick her out of the group and bring back Yasmin. As her father's wedding day approaches and her grandmother continues to push her into being a dutiful, subservient, Muslim Senegalese young woman, and her period begins, all of Amy's really big feelings take over.

Amy sabotages Yasmine and shows up to the dance competition. With no time to wait for Yasmin, they accept Amy and run on stage. This is the one scene where we see the routine in full. And it's ... discomforting. The girls look like strippers. And I don't mean they look like some of these hip hop dancers who have some sexualized moves in their routine. I mean that I don't recall any hip hop in their new routine at all. The entire routine consisted of them humping the floor and putting their finger in their mouths and grabbing their crotches.

And the audience is having none of it. Except one dude, apparently. He seemed to think the routine was fine. But everyone else in the audience was shaking their heads, one mother covering her young daughter's eyes, some booing, lots of mumbling. The judges, however, all seemed to think it was fantastic, if their smiles and nods were anything to go by. That's disturbing.

While dancing, Amy seems to have some kind of emotional breakdown. Everything that has happened up to this point seems to have all come crashing in on her mind as she realizes what she's doing. She starts crying and flees the stage in the middle of the performance.

She runs home, where her grandmother sees her competition costume and calls her a whore, and then attacks her mother for having raised a whore daughter. Amy's mom finally stands up to her mother and tells her to back the fuck off and takes Amy into her room to comfort her. They seem to reach an understanding. Her mom tells her that she doesn't have to attend her father's wedding if she doesn't want to, which is about to start. So Amy changes out of her dance costume into a reasonably modest pair of jeans and a sweater, skips the wedding, and goes outside to play jump rope with the neighborhood kids.

And that's where it ends.

There was no "dance industry" in this film. It was mostly just 4 girls with too much unsupervised, unguided exposure to grown-up media. Had they been a part of a studio, it's quite possible that they would have been discouraged from the dance routine they choreographed.

This movie was far more like a Judy Blume novel, or a John Hughes film. It showed young kids under immense pressure with either not enough parental guidance or the wrong kind of parental oversight. Then, left to their own devices, their very large, overwhelming feelings drown the hormonal tweens and leads them to make very poor choices while they try to figure themselves out.

In the end, Amy figures out that she made some poor choices. But she can make other choices, and life will go on.

A few days ago, I just spent several hours watching teenagers kill other teenagers, get into large-scale fist fights with each other, learn how to use machine guns and grenades and kill enemy soldiers, and then barely-out-of-teens having lots of sex and snorting lots of cocaine and drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. These movies were also about young people figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on (maybe not for the ones who died, but the rest will go on).

A whole bunch of years ago I read books with girls getting their periods, having sex, dealing with death, feeling lots of feelings, and also figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on.

This is what it means to have a "coming of age" drama.

There is a country song that says "I believe that youth is spent well on the young / 'Cause wisdom in your teens would be a lot less fun". I don't happen to agree that youth is spent well on the young, but I definitely agree that wisdom in your teens would be a lot less "fun", for some value of "fun". I am frankly amazed some days that I lived to see adulthood. Between racing my car and rolling it down a hill and running from and waiting out a mountain lion from atop a water tower and sneaking out at night to party with kids doing way to many fucking drugs, it's really only luck that allowed me to live to see "wisdom". I'm not sure that my middle aged wisdom would have resulted in less fun, so much as different fun. I'm having lots of fun as an adult too, only with much less risk.

My point is that the teen years are a pretty fucking foolish age. It's when bodies change and emotions get really large but the brains are not yet developed enough to know what to do with with it all. Everything is confusing, everything is humongous, everything is immediate, everything is absolute.

And that's what we see in "coming of age" stories. These stories are uncomfortable. These stories are challenging. These stories are difficult. These stories are often a little bit ugly. Because that's what the teen and pre-teen years are - uncomfortable, challenging, difficult, and often a little bit ugly.

Which makes Cuties a pretty damn good representative of the "coming of age" genre.

The movie does not draw any hard conclusions, as a good "coming of age" drama ought not. But what lesson it does impart is that the oversexualization of these young girls was definitely not for their own good. Amy was caught between too repressive and far too unfettered at a time in her life when her emotions were also too big whilst her knowledge and reason was far too inexperienced.

This led her to ping-pong between extremes, both being wrong. She needs to stop bouncing back and forth off the opposite walls and find a path between them that she can walk at a more reasonable pace without banging herself up on both walls. Which is, I feel, a common dilemma for many young girls. It certainly was for me.

Telling an uncomfortable story about an uncomfortable situation does not necessarily condone or support that situation or that action. It depends on how the story is told. For instance, 50 Shades very clearly romanticizes abuse by not recognizing what the character does as abusive and perpetuating the trope that a man can be "saved" by a good woman.

Flowers In The Attic wasn't romanticizing parental abuse or incest, although both were the vehicles for the tension in that novel. It was telling a story intended to make the reader feel off-kilter because of the horrific things happening to the characters. It was definitely never defended as some sort of introduction to a world people were clamoring to get into. Not a single person read Flowers and said "sure, it's not totally accurate about incest, but at least it got people talking about it, and maybe we can guide them to the correct way to do it!" You were supposed to feel uncomfortable when you read Flowers, even if you could empathize with the characters.

Cuties told an uncomfortable story. It showed a girl chafing at her repressive upbringing, flinging the chains off and jumping head-first without the benefit of a parachute, and only then realizing that she actually just jumped out of a frying pan and into a fire. To mix my metafores, which I have a tendency to do.

The movie seemed to imply that it was the influence of the media (social media, pop media, etc.) that was responsible for Amy's decent into hypersexualization. And, yeah, there is a lot of it out there for children to stumble across. But I also think that this is the inevitable outcome when children aren't given any guidance for how to navigate that media and what it means. I saw little to no adult mentorship in this film, other than Amy's occasional lessons to pray for a life of subservience to a man and no respect for her agency in any form.

What I definitely saw absolutely none of was pedophilia, btw. Pedophilia is a mental health condition where adults are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. Most pedophiles do not harm children. Most are aware that they have a dangerous condition. Sexual assault tends to be perpetrated by people who are not pedophiles. I know this is difficult to understand, but assault and abuse (in all their forms) are not about *attraction*, they're about *power*.

There was absolutely no pedophilia anywhere in this film. There was nothing about adults being attracted to pre-pubescent children. In fact, everyone (but one older teen in the audience of the competition) was repulsed by the sexualization of the girls.

There was also no *system* or *industry-wide* hypersexualization of children. This was not Toddlers & Tiaras or Dance Moms, where the industry itself is so competitive that it keeps falling into more and more adult requirements of children for the sake of competition.

But there *was* children exhibiting sexualized dance moves that they learned from pop media. And the tone of the film clearly disapproved.

We can possibly have a conversation about the ethics of a director teaching children how to play these kinds of roles where their characters are doing adult dance moves, but if we're going to have that conversation, then we need to talk about children in horror movies for the last 50 years, and docudramas showing young guerrilla soldiers, and every movie from the '80s showing teen violence and bullying. There better not be a single person complaining about Cuties who also thinks Lolita or The Professional are good films.

Child actors are still actors. They are required to play roles to tell the story. Sometimes their characters are bad people and sometimes they do bad things and sometimes bad things happen to them. This is unavoidable if we are going to tell stories about the experience of children. It's challenging to protect a child from the experience of playing a role, and that's an ongoing conversation that needs to continue. But children in real life go through some shit, and if we're going to tell stories about the lives and experiences of children, we're going to have to see that shit they go through. We have to be able to share our stories as children.

And that's what this film is, by the way. It's the dramatized experience of the creator - a Black Muslim Senegalese-French woman. This is her story. She needs to be able to tell her story, and we need to be able to see it. And this story very clearly tells a tale of a young girl who lived through some shit and made some poor choices, as children do, and life went on.

Just like every good "coming of age" story ever.

Now, having watched the movie, I would not say this is a film critiquing the dance industry's use of children's bodies. I would say that this is a film telling the story of a young girl experiencing things that some young girls experience, many of which are harmful and cause hardship to the child. That makes it a "coming of age" film. And one that has an opinion of some of those experiences, and that opinion is pretty solidly against them.

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There's Little Else That's As Polyamorous As A Swing Jam

Wed, 06 May 2020 04:24:17 GMT

BTW, there's very little that's more poly (outside of poly-specific and/or sex-centric activities) than a swing jam. I keep talking about how partner dancing is both a good analogy and good training for poly relationships, but a swing jam is about as poly as it gets on the dance floor.

A handful of dancers wait on the floor while everyone else forms a circle around them (usually they're people with birthdays that month or some other special thing that singles them out).  Then the music starts, and someone from the outer circle jumps in to dance with someone inside the circle. As they dance, another person preps and, without allowing the dancer to miss a beat, takes their partner's place.

It's kind of like a swing dance version of double-dutch jump rope, where kids have to jump in and out of the ropes while they keep spinning, and a line forms with kids who all take turns with one person jumping in as another jumps out.

Some good-natured "competition" can happen between the partners who are cutting in, with one partner cutting in very quickly so the other partner cuts back in almost immediately instead of letting a third person cut in. But it's always done in fun.  And sometimes a "tandem swing" happens, where one person dances with two partners at the same time.

The dancers in the circle have to all be aware of the other dancers around them and how they impact and affect everyone else. They are all there to have a good time.  The partners pay attention to who is there before them, so that they don't cut in too soon and cut someone out of a decent amount of dance time.

The partners also pay attention to who hasn't danced yet and they wait before taking a second turn to make sure others have a chance to dance with the person in the circle.

There is so much awareness of what people are doing that affects those around them and of what the other people are doing that could affect their own decisions on where to be and how to move, and consideration for those who came before and those who will come after, and sharing and switching out partners and joyful play and fun competition and healthy cooperation ... a swing jam is really very much like watching polyamory in motion.

I wish more poly people would get into dancing.

(I know there are more poly dancers out on the West Coast and some in the UK, but that doesn't help me here in Florida or, apparently, anywhere else in the world since only those two locations ever chime in to "correct" me when I complain about the lack of poly dancers. But my point is not that there aren't *any* dancers who are poly or polys who are dancers, but that the greater poly community would benefit from a stronger overlap with the dance community, in general, because of the lessons to be learned through dancing)

This one, btw, is only one person on the floor, but he's someone I happen to know personally. It's his 75th birthday jam and he even has a tandem in there:

I was actually in attendance at this dance, although I did not join the jam (I never do):

There's a dancer in a silver fringe "flapper" dress in this video who does a fucking amazing job of switching back and forth between lead and follow roles, depending on if her partner is a lead or a follow (and not always along strict gender lines either).

There is also a man wearing shorts and a lei I think who also switches back and forth depending on his partners. In relationships and in kink, I am a switch, but in dancing, this is not a skill I possess at all let alone during the same song and I greatly admire those who can.

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So Much Music History And Music Theory That Young Dancers Just Don't Always Get

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 02:22:49 GMT

I try not to do the "kids today" thing unironically very often, because, honestly, the next couple of generations are pretty amazing. But youth does mean that they've not had a lot of time to acquire as much knowledge as older folk have (whether older folk *do* or not is another story).

Lindy hop tends to be a "young folk" scene. I'm often surprised by how many 1940s jazz songs and artists they know, but that's the music that gets played for lindy hop, so they have exposure to it.

Then, I get accustomed to them knowing some of these classic songs, and I forget that they haven't had as much time to learn like all the rest of music history. They know 1940s jazz because that's what gets played every week at their dances, but most of them did not spend the last 30 years taking music lessons and music theory and playing instruments and studying the intersection of music and fashion throughout history. Mainly because many of them haven't even *seen* 30 years yet.

So I was talking with some 20-something lindy hoppers about hosting themed dance events. Some of them turned their noses up at '50s Rock N Roll, saying they didn't like "rockabilly" and it's too hard to swing dance to it.

...

::blinkblink::

0.o

Oh sweet summer child.

I don't even know where to start. Do I explain the difference between Rock N Roll and rockabilly, or do I talk about the evolution of jazz to R&B to Rock N Roll, or do I start right out with the cultural appropriation and how you can draw a direct line from the origins of lindy hop in Harlem to the creation of Rock N Roll a generation later, or or do I pull out my rant on how interrelated musical genres are so that it's not even that easy to see a delineation between jazz and Rock N Roll, or perhaps I can talk about the ground-breaking socoipolitical impact of Rock N Roll that, again, is on a direct line from the sociopolitical impact of jazz, or maybe I should just bombard them with video clips of lindy hoppers dancing to Rock N Roll to show them how that genre was literally created for swing dancing without even needing a verbal lecture on all the intersections of the subject?

#SuchABigTopic #SoManyConnectingLines #ItRemindsMeOfTryingToExplainToAnAuthorOfAltHistoryFictionTheImportanceOfFashionOnPoliticsAndWhyItIsRelevantToTheirStory

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Dance Etiquette And The Art Of Flirting, aka Twice Is The Limit

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 04:21:50 GMT

#ProTip - Don't ask a woman to dance more than twice in a row either. And by "row", I mean 2 consecutive songs, OR 2 times dancing with you with neither of you dancing with anyone else in between. 2 is the limit, and even that should be reserved for those times when the first dance is at least halfway through the song so that it doesn't really "count" as a full dance.

So, like, you ask her to dance, then you sit down next to her and talk at her for the next 3 songs, then you ask her to dance again, then sit down next to her and talk at her some more, and then ask her to dance a third and a fourth time, and neither of you dances with anyone else in between.

Don't do that.

Don't monopolize someone's time at a social dance. If you sit down next to her and start talking to her, other people are less likely to come and interrupt to ask her to dance with them. So she may only be sitting with you and not dancing with others because you just cockblocked them, not because she's actually that into you.

Ask someone to dance once. Thank them, walk them back to where you picked them up, and then leave them. Make sure you dance with at least one other person next. Keep an eye out to make sure either she has danced with someone else, or she has been standing there so long that she might be feeling ignored so you can offer her another dance because that's what she came there to do.

In non-dance settings (dance settings being ballrooms, Latin clubs, swing dances, etc., non-dances being things like bars, parties, clubs, and other social events), it may seem a little abrupt to limit yourself to just one dance and then bail on them. The Argentine Tango scene has a 3-song minimum limit, so if you're out, like, at a bar or something, you could probably go as many as 3 consecutive songs, or perhaps 1 song followed by conversation followed by another song.

I usually give someone 3 songs just in case they're an Argentine Tango dancer and not just socially inept. I started doing that when I first ran into a Tango dancer at a salsa club. He properly did the "ask, leave, ask later" method a couple of times, and then we danced a partial song so he asked for a second consecutive song, and then mentioned being a Tango dancer who was used to 3 songs, so I acquiesced to the Tango etiquette and he very properly dropped me off after the 3rd song and left me alone for a while so we could both dance with others.

Once I recognized this as a thing, I have now had it happen to me several times, so I give everyone a 3-song limit, where I will try to leave after one song, but if they hold onto me for a second song, I will give them 3 songs to let go voluntarily, after which time I will abruptly just leave them on the floor. So far I have met several Argentine Tango dancers this way and I've only had to interrupt one person who was going for a 4th song and who was not a Tango dancer. (I also did not dance with him again).

Those who have mastered the art of flirting know the trick to "leave them wanting more". Give them a taste, and then back the fuck off for a bit. Tell them you see someone you know that you want to say hi to, and you'll be back later, or something. Then surreptitiously keep an eye out. Are they scanning the crowd for you? Or are they keeping their head low, hoping you won't see them again? Or are they scanning the crowd for someone else to rescue them?

Catch their eye again, smile, nod, and go back to what you're doing. Do they reciprocate? Or do they seem to have a 6th sense for avoiding your eye?

Partner dance events have ages-old etiquette customs that are actually pretty good guidelines, for the most part. Especially because, as a geek myself, I know a lot of people who find social interactions to be kind of mysterious. So here's a good guideline if you don't have an intuitive sense of how to entice someone with the taste / back off / reel them in style of flirting.

No more than 2 songs. Whether that's actually dancing or chatting and using the songs as a timer. 2 consecutive songs, or 2 times in a row of dancing with them with no other partners for either of you in between (or, say, 2 songs worth of conversation with them, one-on-one, with no conversations with other people in between).

Go away for a little bit, see if you can catch their eye and do they seem excited to have you come back? Then come back. Rinse, repeat.

If not dancing, do this unless / until you get into a conversation with them where they seem focused and engaged, and there is good back-and-forth where you are both contributing, they keep their attention on you and the conversation, and seem excited to talk to you about whatever you're talking about.

Then you can talk to them as long as you both seem to want to talk to each other. But I still recommend looking for natural pauses in the conversation and breaking off to "say goodbye to my friend over there" or grab a drink or even to dance with someone else, and then coming back to continue the conversation later. That excitement that builds as one hopes for you to return really seems to affect a lot of people, so use it.

It will feel a little awkward, and maybe even a bit contrived at first, but practicing enough times at the "hello, now we engage, now I'm off again, now I'm back!" social interaction will make it easier with practice, and it will help you to avoid those awkward moments when you think someone is into you and they're desperately hoping that the ground will open up and swallow them whole just to escape without having to tell you that they don't want to talk to you anymore.

#TheArtOfFlirting #PartnerDancingLessonsAreOftenApplicableOutsideOfTheBallroom

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A Brief Tidbit Of Dance History: The Sock Hop

Sat, 29 Feb 2020 18:27:35 GMT

#Irony: Today, sock hops are considered a throwback to a more innocent time, with fresh-faced youngsters in sweaters and poodle skirts or blue jeans and letterman sweaters. They're considered "good, wholesome, family fun". Lots of family-friendly organizations ilke church social groups, host sock hops so that everyone can get all dressed up in cheesy costumes and dance to our now-grandparents' music.

But sock hops at the time were wildly controversial. It's true that they were intended for teens, but the music that was played was considered by the adults to be sexualized and taboo. All that wild abandon in dancing and sexual innuendo in the lyrics were sure to lead to wanton sexual behaviour! And music being played by black musicians?! For our innocent young teenagers to hear?! The horror! (ah, American racism in the "golden age" of our history)

The reality is that they were more like the dance scene in Grease (which is not a sock hop, because sock hops were informal dances, not proms or otherwise formal events), with double entendres, and kids getting up to "trouble" while chaperones did their best to keep kids in line.

But today, we revisit them as a quaint, retro party suitable for all ages and communities.

No, seriously, watch that entire scene of the school dance with the spiking the punch and mooning the TVs and the giant sexual free-for-all hand jive number - this is what a sock hop was actually like, except not a formal dance.

Also, fun fact: they were called sock hops because the kids were literally required to take their shoes off before entering the gym so that the soles of their shoes didn't scuff the floor. And, apparently, the teachers were the worst offenders of scuffing the floor so they also went in their stocking feet.

#DanceHistory #DanceGeek

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How Much Do Your Partners Back-Lead You And How Would You Know?

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 06:47:37 GMT

In dance, we have what's called "back leading". This is where the follow actually guides the lead, on a range of subtle to ham-footed non-verbal cues. See, in a proper partner dance, the person who is the lead (in classical dance, it's the same person throughout the song, in progressive dancing, it can switch back and forth) is the one who initiates and guides the dance.

Dancing is like a conversation. One person does the initiating and that same person does the guiding. It can be structured or loose, like a conversation, but one person invites the other person to it, an then based on how the other person responds, guides the outcome. It can meander all over the place or it can be a focused discussion, depending on how the person leading it wants it to go.

It's also very much like a well-crafted D/s scene, again, where someone is "in charge", but the better Doms don't just rigorously plan the whole event moment by moment, tool by tool, emotional response by emotional response. They set the overall scene for the sub and invite them to play in that scene, guiding the mood but ultimately paying attention to the sub's mood and desires and re-crafting the scene in the moment as a response to the sub's responses to the Dom's efforts.

Also kinda like a DnD game. I don't game, myself, but I keep seeing memes about how a Dungeon Master will create a beautiful, rich, nuanced storyline, and then the players will sit down and, like, spend the next hour torturing a chicken or something. The DM has a bunch of stories and circumstances in their back pocket, to throw at the players no matter what choices they make, and sometimes they have to make something up on the spot because their players threw them a curve that nothing in their back pocket can cover. But ultimately, the DM is "in charge" (for whatever value of "in charge" one can have with a room full of geeks and their own ideas) and is responsible for guiding the outcome of the game.

Dance is like all of that. The follow is responsible for paying attention to the cues that the lead is giving, and working within the framework the lead offers to create a visual and physical work of art (or conversation, or scene, or game). Follows are given a range of freedom in how much input they have on the course of the dance, depending on the style, from almost none to "wait, who is the lead and who is the follow again?"

But sometimes we get a mismatch of experience in a dance pair, and the follow may be more experienced than the lead (or just think they are). And sometimes that follow will attempt to guide the lead into guiding the follow more properly. This is called "back-leading".

Sometimes this is appropriate. When the lead has consented to learning from the follow, the follow may choose to show them what the proper form or invitation feels like, so that they can learn how to do that move on their own. Sometimes, the follow does it out of a sense of compassion or kindness. The follow may find themselves dancing with a lead who doesn't know what they're doing, so the follow tries to "help them out" by guessing at the lead cues and going ahead and doing things anyway, making the lead feel that the dance is going well.

But this is kind of like faking an orgasm - sure, the lead might feel better about themselves in the moment, but they will believe that the execution of the move was done well because of something that they did, and they are likely to be tempted to continue dancing this way in the future, and with other partners. In the moment, in a social dance where it's rude to break into a song to teach someone who has not agreed to be your student, it might feel kinder to just smile and go with what you're pretty sure are their intentions even if they weren't really giving you the proper signals.

Most follows that I know do this. There is a certain threshold that we each have for ourselves before we will become exasperated enough to breach etiquette and correct someone in a social setting (or, if we're never willing to do that, we might just avoid dancing with that partner again).

Someone recently said that she was refusing to back lead anymore, because it was a "politeness" that was ultimately hurting the lead. The lead would never learn that they are not executing the lead signal properly, and if they danced with a partner who was less experienced than this follow, that other follow would not understand and would not do the intended move. The lead would then believe that the follow was at fault, and neither of them would grow from the experience.

But this follow also said that they didn't want to break etiquette by turning a social setting into a lesson when the lead didn't ask for it. I know that *I* hate it when my partner takes it upon himself to start "teaching" me, as opposed to suggesting a new move that I willingly want to learn in the moment (I have a whole other story about this that I'll share in the comments).

So, instead, this follow said that she was just going to not do the move that the lead wanted her to do if she couldn't tell from the actual lead signal what he wanted her to do.

There are some moves that just naturally move from one to the other, and if you are a part of a local community and are familiar with the lessons in that area, you likely know which steps they have been taught based on their experience level. Whenever I go to a new city, I can often tell who are the students who just had a class or who take the same series of classes, from the dancers who have been dancing for a while and just know things (or are visiting from different regions, like me), even if the students are natural dancers or are really good or have that whatever that makes them seem experienced. The students all do the same sets of moves in the same order.

Occasionally, a student will try to stand out from the crowd and do something "different" - throw a move out there in an unexpected place. But this usually feels like the lead is trying to "stump" the follow, trying to trick the follow to see if the follow is paying attention, or to be different for different's sake.

An experienced lead can mix up the order of dance patterns because they understand momentum and they can intuitively feel how one move leads into the next, so they know which moves can follow which other moves and they can mix and match. A student often doesn't have this understanding yet, so they just randomly throw things out there, and the follow's center of gravity might not be in the right place for executing that particular pattern, or they might be on the off-foot.

But I digress.

There are some moves that naturally flow from one to the other, so an experienced follow can often intuit which move the lead wants the follow to do even if the lead didn't give a clear signal (or any noticeable signal at all, for that matter). This follow declared that she was simply not going to intuit or guess what pattern the lead wanted her to do based on her knowledge of how dancing typically goes. If the lead didn't give her a signal that she could read, she would just not do the move and she would just basic in place until he gave her a signal that she could follow.

Things got really interesting for her on the floor when she started doing that.

Suddenly, leads who thought they knew their shit were all "why aren't you doing the move?" and she was like "I couldn't tell from your signal what you wanted me to do" and some of them were getting upset with her for not being able to read them. Many of the leads thought their collective failure to perform this dance was *her* fault, for not being a good enough dancer to know the signals, and when they tried to verbalize with her, would get hurt, shocked, or offended when she said it was their fault.

Especially when it was a partner she had danced with before and she had done that move in the past, so they knew she could do it, but seemed unable to do it now. Kinda like when someone who used to fake orgasms suddenly stops, and the other partner wonders why the technique that always worked before isn't successful now.

Some leads took her refusal to back lead with more grace, asking for advice on how to better lead her. Dance communities, after all, do (in principle) encourage and champion the art of Not Taking Rejection Personally, and there is the mantra that It Is Always The Lead's Fault (which has its own problems, but that's for another time).

But even with the social etiquette dictating a person's outward behaviour, to those of us so used to reading extremely subtle and nuanced non-verbal communication, it was quite obvious that a lot of leads had a hard time after a dance-lifetime of thinking that they were communicating, suddenly being faced with the possibility that they were not communicating well after all. And then simultaneously being expected to correct it and carry the load from that moment on, when they had no tools or experience for how to do that, because they thought they already were and it turns out that they weren't.

It turns out, suddenly refusing to be the Relationship Manager anymore, when one partner is part of an entire group of people who have been raised from birth to not do any relationship managing or maintenance and to not even see it being done because another group was raised to do all of it and to do it invisibly or risk the first group's ire - when one partner suddenly has all that relationship maintenance dumped in their lap with no instruction manual and expected to start managing things, that the expression on their face is a lot like those dance leads when this follow stopped back leading.

Relationship Management is an incredibly huge job description, much like Project Management in the work force. It covers a vast array of duties, big and small, and each Project or Relationship has its own unique mix of those duties. And a lot of those duties are learned "on the job", so we're not always aware that we're doing it, or how to train someone else to do it.

My attachment style is "secure", but just like Personality Types are actually more like spectrums rather than boxes, attachment styles also tend to have gradients and I fall more towards the "avoidant" end of the spectrum. When I'm having more mental health issues, I will jump out of "secure" and into "avoidant" completely, but mostly I fall within the "secure" spectrum, just towards the "avoidant" side in which tools I tend to reach for when it comes to Relationship Management and in my relationship expectations (attachment styles is a whole *other* conversation - Google it if this part doesn't make sense to you).

So, because I'm Secure-to-Avoidant, I tend to think of my relationships as really low-maintenance. I'm pretty flexible in what I find to be an acceptable "relationship". Lives 2,000 miles away? That's OK, we can still make it work. Has a busy life and can only see me once a month? I can work with that too. Prefers to chat online rather than by phone? Sure, we can do that. Needs to live apart? Definitely, we can do that.

But, as it turns out, there is still *some* Relationship Management that happens in my relationships. Whatever goals or expectations we set out for whatever style of relationship we have, those goals and expectations still have to be maintained.

Want to have a long-distance relationship where we only chat online? OK, we still have to make time to chat online. Want to only see each other once a month? OK, that once-a-month date still has to be scheduled. I mean, it doesn't have to be *scheduled* like, on the calendar months in advance, can't change no matter what, scheduled. But, like, at some point somebody has to contact the other person and we have to agree on a time and place that fits into our respective schedules.

Things in a relationship are deliberate. We all make choices about how to spend our time and how to behave around other people. Even when two people live together, there is still Relationship Maintenance to be had. A live-in couple might fall into patterns and habits where they just get used to both being under the same roof for certain hours on certain days, but laundry is getting done by someone, and food is being eaten and that food has to come from somewhere.

For a lot of us, certain aspects of Relationship Maintenance can fall to one or the other by default, without anyone really having a discussion about whose job it is to make sure the dishes get washed or whose job it is to call and ask the other one for a date. And to a certain extent, that's OK. We don't need to have conversations on our first date that go "so, I need you to call me and ask me out every time because I won't call you for a date" and "if we decide to do this relationship thing, it will be your job to choose where we go each time." Things can sort of fall to who has the inclination or the skill to do it, sometimes.

But we do need to be wary of how often certain categories of things fall to certain categories of people, and whether that happens in our relationships with each other because we deliberately take on those roles or because it didn't occur to us to try it differently.

When I get into a relationship, I start out advocating for my own needs. So I'll say that I want to see the other person, and I'll actively engage in the process of making a date with them. Sometimes I'll initiate, sometimes I won't, but the point is that I'm an active participant - looking at my schedule, negotiating the day and time, suggesting or vetoing activities, etc.

After a while, though, I will find myself *always* doing that work. If I don't mention that I'd like to see someone, if I don't point out that I'm free on a particular day, if I don't suggest an activity, those things won't happen.

It goes a little like this:

Me: Hey, we haven't seen each other in a while, we should get together.

Them: We should! I miss you.

Me: OK, so when are you free?

Them: I'm free on this day.

Me: Oh, I'm not.

Them: ...

Me: How about this day then?

Them: That sounds good!

Me: Great! There's this activity that I'd like to do.

Them: Sounds good to me!

Me: OK, it begins at this time. If you pick me up by this other time, we should get there just as this part happens.

Them: Alright, I'll be there then.

Me: Oh, the weather is going to be like this, and the occasion is for this kind of attire, so you might want to consider wearing this appropriate outfit.

Them: Sure!

So, what's wrong with that conversation? I'm advocating for my wants and they seem pretty agreeable. Sounds like we both got what we wanted out of the exchange and are happy about it, yes?

Well, yes and no. There's nothing wrong with that specific exchange. What's wrong is that this isn't a specific exchange. What's wrong is when this is *every* exchange. I'm not just advocating for my wants, I'm Managing The Relationship. If I didn't initiate this conversation and have it in this way, the relationship wouldn't exist. That's what's wrong.

Again, this isn't about people taking on complimentary roles and being happy with those roles. Even in complimentary roles, there is still an equal input of energy and responsibility to that role.

In dancing, the lead is responsible for suggesting the next pattern, but the follow still has to do the pattern of their own initiative. If the lead has to physically manhandle the follow into place, that's not dancing (tricks like lifts aside - and even then, the follow still has to contribute to the lift, but that's yet a whole other conversation).

When one's role is the Relationship Manager, and one stops doing that role for any reason at any time, the relationship itself stops. Like when a follow stops back leading and the lead is used to being back led, the dance just stops because the follow is no longer doing anything. And the mix of emotions from confusion to shock to anger to displacement of blame to expectation from a relationship partner when you stop Managing The Relationship looks just like the mix of emotions from a dance partner when a follow stops back leading.

I've decided to stop back leading. If the people I'm dancing with (or will dance with) don't figure out how to lead properly, the dance will have to end because I'm just going to sit here and do the basic step until the music stops, and when that music stops, I'll thank you for the dance and walk off the floor.

I am not going to teach you how to lead unless you hire me to teach you (and I have limitations to my skills as a teacher - past a certain point and you will need an expert in this field). I am not going to intuit for you and do the work in the background. I am not going to stay here on the dance floor indefinitely, patiently, while you figure out how to make me move. Eventually the song will run out. Typically, that's about 3 minutes.

And then I'm going to go sit down and wait for another dance partner who knows how to lead.

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Sometimes The Dance Community Does Not Suck

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 06:37:20 GMT

Y'know what? I complain a lot about the conservatism in my local dance scene. I complain about not being able to develop strong connections to anyone because of their political values, their anti-science beliefs, and their religiosity. But after reading some of the comments on the post that I made on my timeline and in a couple of groups, asking for inclusivity suggestions, I feel the need to express some gratitude towards my local dance communities.

In those dance circles that I frequent, we have the following values that I appreciate:

Yes, the dance scene is quite heavily gendered by default, but when people *do* take the non-conforming role, the community typically accepts it and often embraces it. Women and people presenting as women are more likely to take lead roles in the Ballroom and Latin scenes, while all genders can be seen switching roles in the Lindy Hop and Blues dance scenes. The Lindy Hop scene also trends towards a younger and more liberal demographic.

I have not witnessed any ageism or fat-shaming. This does not mean that it doesn't exist, but it does mean that it's not a common occurrence. I would believe anyone who said they did experience either in my communities, but the people I talk to about it don't seem to have experienced it. People of all shapes, sizes, and ages are welcomed at these dance events, get asked to dance often (regardless of gender), and are active participants in the communities.

In my local communities, dance is seen as a social activity and a "community", so the general cultural attitude is that we want everyone to dance and we want everyone to have a good time. To that effect, experienced dancers of either role, and leads of all experience levels, feel that it is their happy duty to go around the room and invite anyone to dance that they see isn't dancing.

Ballroom dance events have a convention called a "mixer" especially for this. Because of the gendering in the dance community and also the gender roles in the culture at large that discourages men from exploring or expressing an interest in learning how to dance (thanks toxic masculinity), dance events are usually 2/3 women and 1/3 men (-presenting people).

So ballroom dance events have at least 2 points in the event where a medley of the same tempo songs are played in a row, the follows (because follows are usually women, and the women outnumber the men) line up along one wall, and the less numerous leads line up across from them. The first lead in line takes the first follow in line, dances her around the floor once and drops her off at the end of the line, and then moves up to take the next available follow for her turn around the floor. This way, everyone gets to dance, if they want to.

This is also a good way to be introduced to other people in the complimentary role if you're new. Now that they've had a chance to dance with you, they know who you are and what your skill level is (and vice versa), and that relieves some of the anxiety about asking someone to dance later.

The communities encourage more advanced dancers to see dancing with newbies as an opportunity, not a punishment or a chore. We take delight in giving newbie dancers more chances to practice because that brings more *advanced* dancers into the fold later as they improve. I'm *thrilled* to do the same 3 steps over and over again with a newbie if it means that they will develop more confidence and keep coming back.

My dance communities, because of that whole "community" and "social activity" thing, also see dating within the community as ... challenging. Nobody thinks you should NOT date another dancer, of course. But pretty much everyone looks on the dance events as meat-market-free-zones. Dances are not the place to hit on people. They are not the place to find partners.

They're like poly discussion meetings in that respect - when you spend enough time with someone at a social event, you might eventually develop a friendship out of that space, and that friendship may eventually lead to a romantic relationship. But the event is for dancing, not hooking up, not flirting, not hitting on people, not propositioning people. People frown on those who hit on other dancers in the scenes.

And because social dancing is a social activity, people also frown on excessive displays of jealousy in the scene. Some people arrive as a couple and only dance with each other. It's allowed, but it's kind of side-eyed. Because of that above-mentioned cultural value of making sure everyone is having a good time (which means everyone is dancing as much as they want to), and because of the gendering of roles and the gender disparity, my dance communities see it as sort of rude to monopolize one person's time when you could be out there sharing your love of dance with everyone.

They don't go too far by insisting that people dance with anyone they don't want to, but having jealousy and not wanting your partner to dance with others is kind of a cultural no-no. When someone in the dance scene gets a non-dancing partner, and the dancer starts to drop off the scene because their partner doesn't dance and they won't or can't dance without them, that couple is usually murmured about. The dancers in my local community see it as healthy for couples to have separate interests, or, if they share the interests, to still be able to do the interest as an individual person, even with other people.

One of the things I liked about my local dance communities, is that when my FB status changed and people found out that I had gotten legally married, not a single person changed how they treated me. Nobody asked me if my husband would "mind" if they asked me to dance, nobody changed their dance style to a more formal, stiff, polite, or distant style, nothing like that. People asked where he was and if he danced, but nobody suddenly got cautious around me or treated me as if I was off-limits.

In my local dance scenes, people are also usually very good about rejections. I can say "not right now" or "no thanks" and they just nod and move on. I'm never afraid of a bad reaction because I've never been given one in my scenes. Everyone sees it as a sign of immaturity and the men in particular are disapproving of people who can't handle rejection gracefully. And the women talk to each other.

Women and/or follows are also encouraged to ask people to dance, so they don't have to simply sit around waiting and hoping for someone to ask them. This is not one of my strengths. I still prefer to be asked than to do the asking, but once I've developed a good dancing relationship with someone, I am more likely to ask them as often as they ask me. There are no gendered rules about who asks whom, for as gendered as the rest of the social conventions are.

So my local dance communities are not perfect. There are still a lot of things that I'd like to see improve. I'd like to see more gender-neutral language (switching back and forth between lead/follow and men/women is still too common), I'd like to see more POC (there are a few, but more Latinx and Asians than black people), I'd like to have more people who share my politics so that I could develop off-the-floor relationships with people, etc.

But not respecting consent, body-shaming, not accepting role-switching, and using the dance scene as a pickup spot are some of the more egregious violations in the dance world that my local dance communities do not support. Not that these things never happen, but they are not supported by my communities. And I have to give them props for that.

For the record, when I teach my lead & follow communication workshop and when I give general dance lessons, I do my best to avoid or reduce all the other complaints as well. So if you ever wanted to learn how to dance, find me at a conference somewhere (or bring me out to your local conferences or communities!) and I will be happy to give some instruction. I don't even have to be at an event for the purpose of teaching dance - I'll teach dance anywhere, any time someone wants to learn.

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How I Can Help You Become A Better Communicator

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 16:41:35 GMT

Here's why my Simple Steps workshop is so important (the workshop where I teach using lead and follow exercises to improve your relationship communication):

I went to an all-night dance event on a Friday - the day after I got fired from a gig over a medical condition. To say that I was having a bad week is an understatement. At that event, I had 2 friends there - one who dances and one who doesn't.

I met them both at roughly the same time. The dancer, I actually met a year or so ago, but only barely. He doesn't live in the US, he only visits here for a couple of months a year. So he came to a dance event once or twice last year, where I met him. I'm not sure I remembered his name until recently.

About 6 months ago, I started doing a weekly dance thing that I helped to organize with this dancer's father. Because it was his father's project, he attended the first couple of weeks even though that style of dance wasn't really his thing. Because it was a late-night sort of event, some of us night owls started staying afterwards to just chit chat. That's where I actually learned his name and set him apart from just "one of the dancers".

We didn't have any alone-time or any particularly intimate conversation, but we got to know each other well enough, and the others who stayed late to talk, that we have formed our own FB chat group to coordinate weekly get-togethers even though that weekly dance event is no longer.

At this same weekly dance event, I got to know one of the employees at the venue. Again, not very well, but we chatted a bit as I arrived and as I left every week, as did some of the other dancers. Then, when the dance event was canceled, we invited him to meet up with us after he got off work, since he really enjoyed seeing all of us dancers show up and now we weren't going to anymore. He and I have since had some *very* personal conversations and some intense alone-time, and we have gotten to know each other pretty well.

So, the day before this particular dance event is when I got fired from that gig. I realized 4 days later that I have officially slid back into my depression, complete with suicidal ideation. But on that Friday, I didn't realize I was heading towards depression, I just thought I was sad and upset over losing the gig, which is to be expected.

On Friday night (the next day), I went out dancing. The dancer friend was performing at the beginning of the event and I wanted to support him. That was enough motivation to push me through my growing depression and make myself leave the house. I fought my depression all night, and on at least 3 separate occasions, I nearly left to just go sit at home and cry. But I didn't. I pushed through and danced all night.

Dancing releases a lot of endorphins. It's a pretty strong mood elevator for me. But "mood" and "depression" are not the same thing, just ask Robin Williams. Once I started dancing, I got into a good mood. But the depression was still there, bubbling under the surface.

Here's my point...

My non-dancer friend remarked on how happy I looked. So I just smiled and mentioned the endorphins. Remember, I didn't recognize my depression yet, but I was a little surprised that the sadness wasn't showing through. I often post a "sneak peak" selfie of my outfits when I get dressed up and go out, and I think it's glaringly obvious in the picture I posted that night.

By the middle of the night after dancing for a few hours, I was feeling energetic and confident, and I was happy to see my friends. And this friend saw that.

But my dancer friend had one dance with me and knew something was wrong. And it was our best dance ever, yet he still knew.

He's a better dancer than I am, and I am new to this particular style of dance. So over the last few months, he's seen me go from unconfident, hesitant, and wooden, to relaxed and confident and trusting with him. So on Friday, we had our best dance ever. He was amazed and said we should have gotten it on video. And I mean it was a *good* dance - I looked like I had been taking lessons and practicing for months, when the reality is that I've never had a lesson in this particular style and I've really only danced it a couple handfuls of times in social settings.

But later, when we left the loud music and walked around outside in the quiet and the dark, the first thing he did was ask me what's wrong.

I was smiling, energetic, and *killing* it on the dance floor. But I was sliding into a depression. The friend who had some really intimate conversations with me couldn't see the depression. The dancer friend held me close for 3 minutes and, even though everything my body did was right, he still felt it.

This is why my workshop is important. With a dance partner, everything is out in the open, laid bare, raw, exposed, vulnerable. You can learn to read that, and honor that. Dance is one of the ways that can be learned.

And, of course, my workshop doesn't teach actual *dancing*, just the parts of dance that are relevant to that ability to communicate on such an intimate, intuitive level. No musicality or physical prowess or ability to memorize patterns necessary. Just pure, unfiltered flow of primal energy between two people.

He was able to read me that easily, in spite of not being a romantic partner and not knowing me very long or very well, because he is a Very Good Lead and I am a Very Good Follow. I can teach you the exercises that will guide you towards those leading and following skills.

But they take practice. He and I have been practicing, independently, for most of our adult lives. We did not need to practice with each other to learn how to read each other. We did, however, need to practice. A lot. For a long time.

My workshop will give you the tools to grow to this level of proficiency. But it's not a magic spell, where you whisper the incantation and move in the ritualistic movements one time and suddenly you're a good communicator. You have to practice the exercises that I will teach you after you leave my workshop.

And I promise, the amount of commitment you put into it will be proportional to the results you will get in the end.

Because he could read me with one 3-minute dance, through the endorphins brought on by physical activity, through my active processes to be pleasant and sociable and pretend like depression isn't a thing, through all the noise and distraction and other dancers, even through the sensuality and flirtatiousness of the dance and the barriers we all put up just for not knowing someone very well. 3 minutes of full body contact, and he knew.

You, too, can learn how to read the people you are close to. If you are driven enough to learn. And I can show you how.

Simple Steps For Better Relationship Communication with Joreth - available to come to your event! My next workshop will be at PolyDay North - SquiggleCon in Carlisle, England. Get your tickets now!

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Watch Alive & Kicking If You're Into Polyamory Or Dancing Or Both

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 17:18:30 GMT

It is my opinion that social partner dancing is *the perfect* activity for poly people. Partner dancing is a conversation; it reinforces consent and active listening and communication; it actively supports multiple partners and good community skills; it's a physical activity that increases endorphins; it rewards effort and personal growth; it provides a pathway for intimacy and vulnerability; it creates an awareness of yourself, your partners, and your effect on others; and it satisfies the Physical Touch Love Language that so many polys seem to speak (possibly why they're drawn to community-based forms of non-monogamy in the first place).

I strongly recommend the movie Alive & Kicking, available now on Netflix (at least in the US, not sure about other countries). It's a documentary about swing dancing, from its origins to its modern day revival.

These are some of my favorite quotes from the documentary because they highlight exactly what I'm always saying about social partner dance and polyamory:

There's a leader and there's a follower. The leader always has to be thinking ahead, planning what they're gonna do next, how they're gonna move the partner. The follower is responding to what the [leader]'s doing and they have this great conversation.
It's a little hard to learn. It's like a lot of good things in life, maybe you have to put in a little work to get to a place where you get tremendous reward.
When you are social dancing swing, there's no choreography. You are dancing to the music that the band is creating.
You have to improvise, you have to negotiate. Kinda like jazz music, this ability to call and respond, to read your partner and see what happens.
You're sharing your imagination with someone else. That's real intimacy. In that moment, you never recreate it, that's what makes it special.
Unlike some dances I've observed that are partner dances but they're very much "I'm on a date with my girlfriend, don't ask her to dance", lindy hop it's understood that everyone dances with everybody. And the more the merrier. I mean I think really if there were a movie called "lindy hop", the tagline should be "the more the merrier".
...
There's an incredible intimacy that forms among strangers. You meet someone for the first time and by the end of the song, you feel like they're finishing your sentences. If I had that kind of connection with someone I met in the grocery store, I'd ask him for his number. But it's not like that. In swing dance, you just move on and then find the next person.
Frankie always called it, like, "3 minute romance". You're just gonna be in love with this person you're dancing with for 3 minutes and it's gonna be amazing, and then you do it again, and again, all night long.

I know that in some areas, the lindy hop community is pretty well saturated with polys and non-monogamists.

But not in all areas, and it doesn't work in reverse - there aren't many *poly* spaces that are saturated with dancers. If I go to a swing dance in the Pacific Northwest, I can be sure to meet a bunch of polys. But if I go to a *poly* meetup anywhere, I can't be sure that I'll meet other dancers, and if I go to any kind of partner dancing here in the South, I'm more likely to meet a bunch of conservative Christians than anything else. And also, lindy isn't the only (or best) style of partner dancing.

And that seems a shame to me because the nature of social partner dancing fits so well with the nature of poly communities. Especially if you expand to *all* forms of partner dancing, not just the acrobatic, elite level of swing dancing highlighted in the documentary.

There are even more elements that I find valuable, such as the reverence the social dance communities have for people of more advanced age that I so rarely see in other areas of society, and the wider community safety net.

So, go watch the show if you have access to it. Maybe it'll inspire you to learn how to dance, or maybe it will help you to understand why I love it so much. It's worth watching, even with the sprinkling of anti-technology sentiment thrown in there (ah, the irony of people who disparage the internet as a form of communication in a documentary that will be disseminated and spread through online viewing & social media, but that's another rant for another day). Roll your eyes at that part, but the movie is worth watching anyway.

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Why Did So Many Latin Music And Dance Genres Originate In Cuba?

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 19:31:55 GMT

www.quora.com/Why-did-so-many-Latin-music-and-dance-genres-originate-in-Cuba

They didn’t. Latin dances originated in a lot of different places in South America and are heavily influenced by Afro-Caribbean rhythms from the booming slave trade and trans-Atlantic travel of the 1500’s-1800s.

Samba originated in Brazil in the very early 1900s: Samba - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal

Salsa doesn’t have a single point of origin but Cuba likes to take the credit for it: Salsa - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal Salsa includes influences from Puerto Rico, Haiti, Africa, and even a little bit of European country dance styles. Mambo is also Cuban, but today’s Mambo is basically the Salsa on a different beat.

Tango comes from Argentina: Tango - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal

Merengue hails from the Dominican Republic but Haiti likes to claim credit for it: Merengue - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal

Cha Cha is genuinely a Cuban dance, having been created by a Cuban composer who invented the music that people eventually developed a dance for: Cha Cha - What Is it? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal

Bachata comes from the Dominican Republic: Bachata (dance) - Wikipedia

Rumba is a Cuban dance, but it also has some differences with today’s rumba/rhumba in the US. The *music* came from Cuba, and a dance was made up to go with the music, but the 2 versions danced today are American Standard (which was invented in the US) and International Standard (which was invented by a French instructor in London). Rhumba - Wikipedia

Bolero is a dance that has two separate styles and two completely separate and independent origins - Cuba, and Spain, with the Cuban version being heavily influenced by other countries like Puerto Rico and Mexico: Bolero - Wikipedia

Paso Doble is usually categorized as a “Latin dance” when you watch the TV competitions, but, ironically, the partner dance is French (based on Spanish military marches & bullfights), and then adopted by Spain and Portugal: Pasodoble - Wikipedia

And then there’s Jive, which is classified as a “Latin dance” under International dancesport categories, but Jive originated as Lindy Hop in New York at the Savoy Theater by a primarily black community and was later codified by Arthur Murray and other ballroom studios to make it easier to teach, and also to compete in. This led to the development of several different sub-categories of Lindy, and the competition version which is classified as a “Latin dance” is called Jive: Swing Dance - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal

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