Welcome Joe, and congratulations to Sue and Kay and Chrystal

A big welcome to Joe - master clogger and now a blogger! (I guess that puts you in the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, respectively, bypassing the twentieth altogether...)

Will wonders never cease. I had a really good time at English last night. Sue called. Chrystal called. And Kay called. Missy and Rebecca called too, and everyone did a good job - fun dances, minimal talking and maximal dancing. I was working hard trying to develop some English dancing chops. I'm at that awkward stage where I know enough to be able to pretend I know what I'm doing, but not enough to keep from regularly embarrassing myself. Lucky for me, I'm used to feeling that way. I figure you just have to wade into the water and thrash around a bit before you learn how to swim.

Kay did an especially good job finally conquering "St Louis". There's one fiendish spot in the dance where two figures flow together across the phrase between the B1 and B2 sections of the music. Since most of the time, moves are contained within one section of the music (just count to eight twice), with a natural "phrase ending" to those moves that coincides with the natural phrase ending of the music, it's normally easy to keep track of whether you're doing the right thing at the right time. But in this dance, you move out of (get this) three-quarters of a double figure of eight (huh?) right into a gypsy. How the heck are you supposed to know when the wandering around stops and the gypsy starts? Add to that, that the gypsy ends in an unusual way, and must be precisely on time, you've got yourself one doozy of a difficult dance. Kay nailed it.