Pinewoods 1: Bringing the hips

The main dance pavilion at Pinewoods is called C# (named for Cecil Sharp; the smaller pavilion nearby is called C# Minor). It's a sprung-wood dance floor with open sides and a vaulted roof, located at the bottom of a dell in the heart of the woods. The neighboring bog was rain-swollen to a pond of reasonable size this year, and male gray treefrogs on the shore (I identified them just now with a bit of help from Peterson) accompanied the band, sounding like a clutch of arboreal telephones. I spent a non-trivial fraction of Monday's dance trying to get pictures of them; they blend remarkably well with the tree bark they cling to, but their piercing calls led me to them. Magically, they hushed up for Abbots Bromley on Thursday night, when the lights were dimmed and a procession of antlered and Robin-Hooded dancers wended their way through the trees, across the floor of C#, and off into the night. Just as the last strains of the fiddle and triangle were fading, the frogs started up again, breaking the spell with their loud PRRRRRRRREE!s.

In my attempt to explain why this Pinewoods was so nice for me, I'll start at the end:

After the last dance on the last night, everyone in their finery joins hands around the perimeter of C# to sing Auld Lang Syne. (This is a tradition I'm accustomed to from Scottish sessions and Hogmanays; it might be unfamiliar to the ESS weekers.) We sway, we look around at old friends and new friends, we skip into the middle and back out joyfully. Then, someone—usually Terry H., or someone similarly Important—thricely calls out "Hip hip!" and the crowd responds "Hurray!" which puts a festive cap on the week's dancing. But this time, when the song ended, there was...silence. An expectant, slightly confused silence. Before I could quite stop myself, I shouted, "Hip hip!" And all the dancers shouted, "Hurray!" Again: "Hip hip!" and again: "Hurray!" And a third time: "Hip hip!" "Hurray!" And the dance was over.

Often, at Pinewoods, I wonder why I'm there, how I'm contributing to that idyllic little microcosm. I dance a bit, I jam with the band, I take photos, I flirt...but I usually feel like an observer, like things would go just as well (or better) without me. But this week, somehow, I was in the thick of things—yelling "Hip hip!" when it was needed, unable to write a postcard Friday night because of the neverending stream of people asking me (me!) to dance. Some of this can probably be attributed to my ceilidh act (more on that anon), some to the less cliquish nature of ESS compared to Scottish sessions, some to my lack of preoccupation with any one person. Whatever the cause, it was a lovely, a lovely lovely, feeling, and precisely what I needed.

Hip hip. Hurray.

Goblin interlude

I listed my highschool on LJ, and saw that there are three other LJers who overlapped with me at good old PHS. One of them is bleaknimue, who makes the coolest goblin sculptures, and will be exhibiting them at World Fantasy Con. Take a look at her artist page.

Neither of us remembers the other, which is sort of a shame—she seems like the sort of person I wished I'd known in high school. But she was at WisCon, so it's very possible some of you have met her.

(Er...go Clippers!)