Big Fun at the Dance

The contra dance band that I play with, The Mound City Slickers, played for the Childgrove Country Dancers last night. I can’t tell you how much fun it was. This was the first dance we’ve played for with our current lineup of two fiddles, banjo, guitar, and ukulele, and with all due modesty, I want to say we were hot. I think we impressed the callers, too, since we took requests and didn’t have any trouble changing up the set list to accommodate the dances that the callers wanted to call.

It was interesting (and fun) that there was a different caller for each dance last night; something that I’ve not run into before. Each caller had a different level of experience and a different style. But we got through them all without a train wreck and had a blast doing it. I think mixing up the callers kept us interested as well as the dancers because of all the differences.

Other excitement for the evening was that there was a casting crew at the dance for some reality show called The Farmer’s Wife or something like that. Apparently, they’re going to film this TV program in or around St. Louis (a hotbed of farming and rural life…. Yeah. Right.) where ten women from L.A. try to get a farm boy to pick them to marry and win a lot of money. One of the “tasks” that they’ll have the women do to prove they’re worthy is go to a square dance. Likely, the point will be to show how goofy and humorous folks who square dance are. Anyway, we had a group of heavily tattooed, very hip young women from Hollywood running around with cameras filming the dance and getting people to sign up to possibly be dancers when they film the actual dance for the show. Which I understand they’re going to film under the Gateway Arch. Yes, it makes no sense to me either. But we all had a good time watching them film the band and the dancers and the five of us agreed that if they asked us to play for the dance on TV and gave us a lot of money, we’d be more than happy to do it.

Of course, as always, the big fun of the evening was getting to play tunes and watch the dancers having so much fun moving around the floor. It’s what the music is all about. It just doesn’t get any better than playing good music with friends for a bunch of appreciative dancers. I don’t know how long I’ll keep smiling about last night. Probably a long time.