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social dancing USA Dance

Big dancing weekend

For a city of its size (about 100,000 people), Macon offers a lot more dance events than one would expect.  Various individuals and groups host dances every weekend of the month.  Sometimes, one dance will fall on a Friday and  one on a Saturday.  Then we all spend Sunday with big smiles on our faces, resting our tired feet!  This weekend has been one of those two-dance weekends.  I have my fuzzy slippers on as we speak.

This past Friday evening was Macon’s First Friday celebration.  On the first Friday of each month, downtown restaurants and entertainment venues throw open their doors with special events to encourage people to enjoy downtown nightlife.  We always attend Paula East’s First Friday dance at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.  Paula always kicks off the evening with a complimentary lesson, then we take over the center rotunda of the building to practice what we’ve just learned.  This month we learned some samba steps.  Someday, when our samba is all grown up, it will look like this one, but it’s not there yet.

Saturday night was our USA Dance chapter’s monthly social at the Howard Community Club.  Lately we have been mooching new steps from Paula’s assistant instructor Jim Riley at every chance we get; last night he taught us this crazy pretzel-y step in swing that is going to look very cool if we can get it clean and crisp enough.  Between ballroom CDs, John (chapter president) always plays a few line dances.  Daniel got up and learned the “Swamp Thing,” a complicated-looking line dance that I’d never seen before moving here.  It reminds me a little of the “South Side Shuffle,” which I used to dance back in Oklahoma.

The best part of going to these regular weekend dances is seeing the people who AREN’T regulars.  I’m always excited to see new dancers showing up and having a good time, because that means our dance “scene” is growing and gaining momentum.  Hooray!

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