Local TV station WMAZ ran their promotion of the “Dancing for our Heroes” event as part of their “Scene 13” weekend entertainment roundup on last night’s 11:00 news and again on today’s morning news. Here is the story; our event is the first one presented in the package:
Hope to see everyone at the Aviation Museum tomorrow night!
Maconites, tune in to the 11:00 news on WMAZ, channel 13, on Thursday the 27th. During the “Scene 13” feature you will see members of the Greater Macon and Houston County USA Dance chapters (including yours truly!) dancing and promoting this coming weekend’s “Dancing for our Heroes” event. The feature will also be rebroadcast around 6:40 a.m. on Friday the 28th and will be online under the “Entertainment” section of 13WMAZ.com.
As soon as I can get a link or an embeddable video clip, I’ll post it.
Around here, the dance scene always slows down over the summer. A lot of people are traveling, so not many events are scheduled. As the summer winds down (our schools start early, so for all intents & purposes the summer is now over), the dance events wind up. On Friday we attended the monthly dance at the Howard hosted by John Herren et al.; tonight is our Sunday Night Dance Party, also at the Howard.
Last night we went to Warner Robins for Dance Houston County‘s monthly social. They have recently moved their monthly dances to an excellent new venue, the Warner Robins Conference Center. The facility offers nice chairs, adequate air conditioning, and most importantly, a good floor! The Houston County chapter offered free admission to last night’s dance to anyone who had bought a ticket to the Dancing for our Heroes event that is coming up on August 29. Their chapter president, Kristin Streilin, said that hardly anyone had paid to get in, so it sounds like ticket sales are going well.
But if you don’t already have a ticket to Dancing for our Heroes, I know that some are still available. The event is a fundraiser for the Hearts to Heroes chapter of the Wounded Warrior Project and will be held at the Museum of Aviation’s “Century of Flight” hangar. Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 at the door and are available from board members of Dance Houston County and USA Dance Greater Macon.
Just received via email a link to WMAZ’s video from Friday. Fortunately (since I was exhausted and probably speaking gibberish), they did not use any of the interview clips but instead put together a nice montage of all of us dancing.
I will post this on the Video Gallery page as well.
EDIT: I’ve removed the video from the main page since it auto-plays every time one visits the page, which is not much fun. Check the Video Gallery page to see it.
Photos from the SouthernStar Midsummer Classic competition are now available here. We are in the American Smooth and American Rhythm divisions.
Also, last night a reporter/cameraman from WMAZ showed up at our First Friday dance at the Sports Hall of Fame. He took video of us dancing and recorded short interviews with Paula and with me. I don’t think the video made it on the air but they did put a story on their Web site (those are my feet in the photo slideshow!). If I can find the video somewhere I’ll post it.
I was not expecting to be interviewed or to stand up in front of the First Friday crowd and tell them about our competition results, as Paula asked me to do. Thank goodness I had changed clothes and put extra make-up on! We had come to the dance straight from a lesson in Atlanta with Eddie Ares. Eddie is a fantastic instructor but he works your tail off. We worked on waltz and foxtrot and now we have “homework” to practice before our next lesson on Sunday the 16th. It takes a good teacher to say “You must re-learn the basics” without demoralizing the students. But in the end, the only demoralizing aspect was Friday afternoon traffic leaving Atlanta.
Just realized that I have spent the weekend with two of my favorite sadists: Eddie Ares and Jillian Michaels.
Yesterday, Daniel and I attended Eddie’s “Creating Impact” workshop at Academy Ballroom. It was a fast & furious 90 minutes of rumba and cha-cha exercises focused on making our dancing stronger, sharper, and faster. Very little partnering, very few breaks: just dance, dance, dance. At the end when we were chatting with Eddie, I said “Thanks for the butt-kicking!” He chuckled but then said “Well, conditioning is really important.” Best of all, all the exercises are compact enough patterns that we can practice them at home–provided I can remember them!
He is right about the conditioning, of course. My cardio endurance is better than it used to be, but it could be better still, and my muscles could be stronger too. So today I did Jillian’s “No More Trouble Zones” workout. She describes it as a circuit training workout: it is all toning exercises, no cardio, but fast-paced enough that it gets your heart rate going too. Do a few of her “Surrenders”* and see if your heart doesn’t beat faster.
Eddie’s class was fun. Jillian’s workout…not so much. But because her workouts are so challenging, I always feel like I’ve accomplished something after I finish one. And that’s fun, at least.
*If you don’t know, don’t ask. Trust me.
Click here to see videos of all of our dances at last weekend’s SouthernStar Midsummer Classic. Thanks again to our awesome videographer Jeff for wielding the camera and enduring many hours on a metal folding chair! Here’s one video from the playlist just to get you started. This is silver-level swing; we got straight first places from the judges for this one!
Click through to YouTube to see the rest.
Every competition we participate in brings new pleasures. At this year’s SouthernStar Midsummer Classic in Tampa, FL we got to see a couple we met last year as spectators, John and Theresa, “graduate” to the next level and become competitors. They are such nice, fun people–last year, despite our being strangers to them, they agreed to take video for us with Daniel’s digital camera. Now they are obviously on their way to becoming great dancers: they got two 1st places and two 2nd places out of the 8 events they entered! Yaaay, John & Theresa!
With our former photographers now sharing the competition floor with us, we needed someone new on video duty. Our extremely obliging friend Jeff, who teaches with me at Macon State, made the trip to Tampa with us and spent the whole day Saturday in the folding chairs of the spectator area, wielding the camera. We are so glad to have videos of nearly all our heats. Thanks, Jeff!
Considering how little we’ve been able to dance and practice since we went to Raleigh back in February, we went into this competition with minimal expectations. We were rewarded with excellent results! Our goals were to place better than we did last year and to make one callback in each of the Challenge events we entered. We achieved all of those goals except for one Challenge where we didn’t get a callback. So we are very happy with our results and with the positive comments we got from other dancers. It’s pretty exciting when a Championship-level dancer looks you right in the eye and says “You guys are really good!”
Here are our results:
Because of some scheduling conflicts we’ve decided against competing at the Derby City Dancesport Championship in August and are instead aiming for the High Point Classic Dancesport Championship in October in High Point, NC. After this past weekend we are very excited to keep improving our dancing and to do even better at our next comp.
We had our first lesson today with Wayne Brockman at Academy Ballroom Cumberland. Wayne is a certified adjudicator with 3 decades of competitive experience. A year ago, he left his successful studio in Colorado in his daughter’s hands and came to Georgia to teach with his sister. We are glad he’s here! The lesson was outstanding. We worked on waltz and tango, focusing on body flight and volume, correcting our posture and footwork. I had no idea it was possible to learn so much in one hour. I’m eager to practice what we learned today and already excited for next Friday’s lesson.
During the lesson, Wayne was correcting my position in closed hold. As I shifted in order to “dance it to the left,” my concentration momentarily broke, captured by a sight nearby. “Hey!” I exclaimed. “There’s a Chipotle right across the street!” Wayne burst out laughing. I tried in vain to reassure him that I would, in fact, choose a lesson with him over a burrito from Chipotle. I would! Really!
Our registration form for this year’s SouthernStar Midsummer Classic in Tampa went out in the mail today, so it’s official–we are going! By the end of the month we also expect to register for the Derby City DanceSport Championship in Louisville, KY. It’s going to be a busy few weeks but we’re looking forward to making up for the last couple of months during which we didn’t get to do much dancing. Daniel’s knee is all healed up and he is ready to get busy!
We are especially looking forward to Tampa because at least one of our friends will be making the trip with us to serve as photographer, videographer, and cheerleader. Since we are the only dancers in our chapter who travel to competitions we are always on our own–that’s why we never come back with any pictures to share! This time will be different, so stay tuned for pics at the end of this month.
On Sunday we head up to Atlanta for our first lesson with a new instructor. I don’t want to identify him without his permission, so for now I’ll just say he comes highly recommended and has a long and distinguished dance career. We are looking forward to getting to know him and working with him to improve our dancing.