jere7my | Road to Boston

The Flurry could as easily be called Saratoga Folkdancecon 2007, if "easily" doesn't count syllables; it's nigh-indistinguishable from an SF convention, with over a dozen parallel tracks of programming, but all the panels are workshops and all the events are dances. The halls are at all times jammed with jam sessions, with a maximum linear distance between groups of about twenty feet. With my own eyes I saw about a thousand contra dancers swirling in dizzying profusion in the main ballroom.

I chatted for a long while with Daniel from Pinewoods, and bumped into Joanna R., a few other Pinewoods people, and the Swarthmore contingent.

redsoxtnt999 and her friend Evan stayed with us, which alarmed the cat but pleased us mightily (she brought three tins of cookies!). I only attended the Saturday evening Flurry, but even so I managed to attend workshops on 1) Delta blues slide guitar, 2) achieving the effect of alternate tunings without actually tuning alternately, and 3) playing in a contra band, which began, fittingly enough, with all of us playing Road to Boston. #1 really made me want to play around with my oregano bottle slide a bit more, though I am decades away from credibility with it; from #2, I mostly took away a nifty new chord technique: Play this on the seventh fret, with the numbers denoting fingers:

3-x-o-4-5-x

And that's a handy Bm there, with an open D string. The nifty part comes in the easy modifications: mute the low E (or fret it with your index finger at the fifth fret) and unmute the A for a D chord, or slide your pinky up one fret for a G chord. Magic!

I was disappointed with the OPEN JAMMING! that the schedule listed in a misleadingly exciting font; there were half a dozen people in an acoustically unfortunate location, sort of playing some Dylan and Tom Petty and U2 together. That was going to be my big chance to play with other people, and I'd been looking forward to it for a week. If I ever return to the Flurry, I'll be more brazen about joining the hall jams, which were much more my sort of thing; as it was, I think my newbieness caused me to miss some boats. Nevertheless, the Flurry was fun and busy and humanityful; I'm glad I went.