Dancing with a Star

In Point Roberts, it is now time be be putting away our tents and banners as we look back on the final festival of the 2009 gala season.  The Music and Seafood Festival this past weekend managed a mostly sunny day and stellar performances from both the seafood and the musicians, not to mention a dancer.  Insofar as I am up on the Sunshine Coast and not in Point Roberts, I know this only from reports of friends who had the good sense to stay and participate.

Only a few weeks ago, we had the Music and Arts Festival, and it would appear from these reports that a festival that provides one food for the soul (music) and one food for the body  (the seafood) has the edge on a festival that provides only foods for the soul.  The big feature, say the reporters, was a klezmer band from Bellingham (it is possible that that is the funniest phrase I’m likely to hear this week).  I mean, if you were going to look for a klezmer band, would Bellingham be your first thought?  But Millie and the Menschn, classically trained musicians from Bellingham, also do the klezmer.

And to add to the phenomenon, Ms. B. Hooping Allure dances, at least some of the time, to the klezmer music and she always dances with what appears to be a stainless steel hoola hoop.  I am truly sorry to have missed this. You can see her perform on her website, but I daresay the combination of the dance and the Seafood and Music Festival either before or after the 20 minute downpour must have been amazingly fun.

But it has given me a new idea for a community project that could secondarily contribute to Point Roberts’  economic development.  Ms. Allure, I am told by yet other friends, gives dance classes and she is a great teacher.  So, how about we hire her to come to Point Roberts to teach us to do hoola hoop exercise/dance?  We could all go down to the beach of a morning—say Tuesdays and Thursdays so as not to compete with the Wacky Walkers--like the elderly Chinese practicing Tai Chi in Taiwan parks, and do our hoola hooping en masse.  Given the space requirements, we’d need to be in Lighthouse Park, I suppose.  Or maybe in a great line all around the edge of the peninsula.  (That would make for a great new ‘coastal photo’ project, Ed.)

  Just how long before the National Geographic and the Discovery Channel would be knocking at our doors, begging to interview us and take our pictures?  And then, the tourism to follow.  Well, the mind boggles.  And if Ms. Allure’s general physical condition is any testimony to hula hooping, we could all be looking forward to newer and much smaller-sized wardrobes.

(Thanks to George Wright for the photos!  And to whomever provided the blue skies!)

Swing Time

For the past several days, we’ve been learning West Coast Swing dancing, compliments of the 18-year-old. She’s off to Berkeley shortly where she is hoping to really learn how to do it and to find someone to really dance with. But in the meantime, there’s Ed and me. And there’s YouTube. She calls up some videos showing people doing it. Then she calls up some instruction videos, same source. And we watch intently on our fairly big, flat screen monitor. It’s 1, 2, 3 4, 5&6. Or something like that.

We try singly, then partner up, then back to singles. And we sort of get it. And then we lose it. We give up on the YouTube videos and try to find some music in our own CD collection, since the YouTube videos are fairly short in length. Maybe Abba? No, too, too, too fast. Maybe Manhattan Transfer? Should work but doesn’t. Maybe I’ll just sing ‘42nd Street’? No one waxes enthusiastic about that attempt. It turns out that we have only singing music, and no dancing music in our CD collection.

Finally, we borrow a Fred Astaire CD from a quilting friend and we discover that ‘Swonderful’ works perfectly. Eventually, near exhaustion, I go to bed, only to find myself lying there, moving my feet in that 1,2,3 and 4,5&6 pattern. Do I have the triplet right? If I do, why am I ending up on my right foot, which I need for the next 1? Can’t sleep, can’t dance.

I’ve never been much of a dancer. My older brother taught me to jitterbug in the early 50’s, but I was never sure he knew how to do it, so didn’t trust that I was actually learning anything useful. When I was in high school, maybe 14 or 15, I went to an LDS Stake House dance and danced with an 18-year-old who obligingly told me I was a terrible dancer and didn’t follow. That probably sealed my doom.

The sixties worked pretty well for me because during that time we just gave up on the idea of partners who do the same thing but in reverse. I can move my feet to the music; I can keep the time and even feel it as I move. But I don’t get the idea that we all have to be doing the same thing at the same time. I like doing my own steps, my own way. Which may be true in more ways than dancing.

Nevertheless, there we are, dancing to YouTube, learning the steps that I will sooner or later refuse to follow. Ed and I and the granddaughter are all in giggles by the time the first evening of dance lessons is over. Ed and I couldn’t be more pleased to be doing this with her, couldn’t be more surprised to be doing this at all. We tend to think about what we can do for the grandchildren, and here is a grandchild doing something for us, instead. Even if I never do West Coast Swing dancing again, we’ll always have this week in August. Which is at least as good as always having Paris.

Celebration of a Sort

This weekend is Point Roberts’ traditional International Arts and Music Festival, a phenomenon that is organized by three or four people in the community every year. It can only be a phenomenal amount of work to get a couple of dozen vendors, food sellers, and musical groups to come down here or up here, as the case may be, and do their thing, such as it is, to the limited audience of Point Roberts.

We went over to Lighthouse Park, the park with no lighthouse, this afternoon to watch a couple of groups, including a sorority of belly dancers, and to see what food and craft were on offer. Lighthouse Park normally is a series of small buildings and boardwalks on the beach that house, most memorably, an Orca Center. But today, there were tents and sound systems and a filled parking lot in addition. And a respectable crowd of visitors, but not an overwhelming one.

The grandchildren, who come from bigger places than this, were underwhelmed, but one takes what one can get here if you, as taker, are a resident. For anyone to come here from outside to work, whether selling hammocks or a group’s latest CD, requires that anyone to cross the border at least once and, in the case of U.S. residents, twice on their way up, and to do it again on their way back down (or up, depending upon which way they are going). And to do it in the heart of summer when the lines at the border are at their very longest. And no going in the fast Nexus lane because you can’t be in the Nexus lane and have items related to your work. That is, no business materials. And if you are Canadian, I am not at all sure how you come down here to sell your goods or your time (if you are a performer), but I would bet a lot that it involves more than just mentioning to the border guards that ‘you’ve got a gig in Point Roberts.’

So it amazes me that the organizers can get anyone at all to make the effort to entertain us at such an event. But it is probably the case that those who are willing to make the effort didn’t have a significantly better offer. Nonetheless, we appreciate the effort. Like the Fourth of July parade this year, better this festival than no festival.

I walked by one lady who was watching the belly dancers cavort while herself knitting a tweed wool sweater. Dozens of little girls crowded the boardwalk stage to take digital pictures of the belly dancers. What will they do with those pictures? A ton of shaved ice, at least, made its way down the gullets of young and old alike, festooned with syrups of colors that don’t even vaguely resemble anything seen in nature. It is hard to imagine exactly what we were celebrating, but perhaps just a sunny day in August.