Folk dance through the ages

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How many people do you know who truly have a lifelong hobby? , this episode is a group episode, and some of these people have been dancing for longer than most of my listeners have been alive 40, 50 years or even more. That is some serious commitment to a scene, as you can imagine, they've experienced some pretty incredible moments in that time.

Welcome to Zeitgeist Radio, where we learn about musical subcultures from people in the scene. I'm Morgan Roe, and if you love this, be sure to subscribe on your podcast platform. My guests today are the Los so SOS Bay Folk dancers, a folk dance group based in Los Sos, California.

I'm Margaret Lang. I live in Nipomo. So I drive 40 minutes to get here. Indeed. It's worth it. And I started dancing in. The early 80s, because my mother introduced me to it.

She went back to college, junior college in Santa Maria, [00:01:00] and took, as a recreation class, she took international folk dancing with a wonderful woman named Audrey Silva, who was an exceptional dancer.

And so that was my initial take to it. And I, I loved it because I've always loved movement and dancing. So I took to it, no problem.

I'm Ann Tyber. I started dancing in about 1980 as well. And it was because I was at home alone for the summer when my children were with their father and I went to a folk dance at Valley College in Southern California and fell in love with the music and I just was fascinated.

My name is Carolyn Lemus. And I'm originally from Hanford, California. And I started dancing in 1950, uh, my parents started dancing and they would come home and talk about the good time they had.

And, I told them one day I wanted to go dancing with them cause they were having too [00:02:00] much fun.

My name's Joy Tooman, I live in San Luis Obispo, and I grew up in New York, and I can't remember when I started, I know I used to go to summer camp, and we danced in summer camp, and I took ballet for years, and my mother used to come and teach some folk dancing at the end of the ballet class

I am Jenny Lapitis and I came into folk dancing in my seventies, and I have a long list of things I have quit, like macrame, piano, foreign languages. Uh, any art project, nothing ever spoke to me. And when I came to this, I said, I'm a beginner and no matter what, I am not giving this up because there are so many levels to what this means to me personally.

I like to think I'm a spiritual person. I like to look at people's souls. And I feel that it's very revealed here, and everybody, as you can see, takes me under their wing. [00:03:00] So little by little I have improved and I have no high expectations, but I'm welcome

my name is Billy Burke. Um, if I annoy you, call me William, and if you want to annoy me, call me Bill. Uh, my mother started dancing when I was one and subsequently started teaching us when I was two or three. And we started a, a little performing group when I was 12, called the Pulpateers, and we performed Well, Mae were big, so we were the,

Pulpateers

and we performed in schools and folk dance festival and the like.

I was able to join my first adult group, uh, with whom my mother danced Madeline Green's workshop in San Francisco. Uh, I had to wait. I was 15 and I had to wait until I was taller than the shortest woman in the group who was Teddy Walterbeek. Bless her heart. She's still dancing.

/ Now this is a musical podcast, so of course I had to ask about the music folk dance groups do dances from all over the world. We'll hear more about that later on, which also means the music is from all over. [00:04:00] That said, it can sometimes be a little hard to get your hands on since it's very acoustic and a low tech scene, but if you can find some recordings, the music can be one of the main drivers for people participating

the music turned me on and all that summer I went to every single folk dance I could go to. Uh, there were many, and sometimes two on the weekend, and I was totally free. So, that started me. I joined every group there was, and I learned how to teach, uh, from several teachers, Trudy Bronson being one, and, um, Phil Slater, and, anyway, That started me being critical because I started figuring out how to teach things myself.

I used to sit in the bathtub at night and listen to the music with my tape recorder and I would see if I could remember how the steps went. The music is something that attracts me, has from the very beginning, [00:05:00] and of course the friendships, and that'll make me cry. So it's been a wonderful time,

Uh, the music of it is so interesting. I play music and one of my epiphany that you mentioned before was going to a dance camp and there's this little potluck band. So we brought a guitar, brought my guitar, learned some of the songs, and we put together a few songs and actually played the music for the dancers, which was a whole different experience.

It's like from that end of it. Being involved and being, making this connection with the dancers, it was just, ugh, just set so deep in my soul to be able to do that

/ , the symbiotic relationship between the music and the dance. There's this relationship with the music and the musicians. And I don't dance to the melody. I don't dance to the lead singer. I dance to the percussion. I listen to the bass or the drums and those little nuances that, that they do.[00:06:00]

I mean, you've seen like Buchan skol where I do that little thing that you say, what are you doing there? Um, the, the drummers are doing that. So I know that my body has to, has to reflect that and that's, that's the depth, that's the real joy. I mean, that really is why can I do Ushest which is a three measure dance and I've done it for 50 plus years and I'm still inventing steps because all these little nuances I can find, uh, Buchansko, very simple dance

but it's so much a pleasure .To have this relationship with the music. Particularly if you ever get to dance to live music.

So I go to a lot of folk camps and festivals, and usually there'll be, um, featured teachers, master teachers, and they'll often have their music for sale, uh, so that it's one way to acquire it. Um, and there's, there's a lot of sharing amongst. Hm. Amongst [00:07:00] dancers. I follow, I dance via Zoom, uh, with a group in Massachusetts and I'm, I'll always email 'em, said, oh my God, I love that dance.

Can I have the music? I'll share the music. Um, something about the music here too, for somebody that's interested in being adventurous with music. Um, I remember during Covid there was this t-shirt that a lot of dancers were wearing, and it said, these are difficult times. So that was a pun because it was a staff and it had

various time signatures, uh, that you'll find in folk dancing, like seven eight, and I can't remember all the rest of them. Um, but so you don't need to know necessarily, this dance is in seven, eight. You know that that's gonna be, we're gonna call it slow, quick, quick, but we're gonna count it. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3.

1, 2, 1, 2. But you don't have to know that. If you do, it's a plus. And if you're really curious, dive in. You know, so it's a little bit, you can, you can, uh, still do the dance and not [00:08:00] understand all of that. Also, the music is so essential to remembering. When I came back to folk dance after a 30 or so year hiatus, I didn't know if I could still do it.

Well. It felt somewhat like magic. The, the music came on, I recognized it and there was a connection and my feet knew some of the steps, which really shocked me. It felt, wow, it came back, that quickly.

John Filsich was, uh, had festival records, which was a record store. He started out in Oakland, then San Francisco, and then finally Pico and Normandy in la.

Um, and you could buy your folk dance records there. He would, he would produce a lot of 'em, get 'em printed. He had just, I just went to his hundredth birthday party in Arcata and he was dancing. He taught a class with me. Um, as a matter of fact, tomorrow I'm going to Burbank. I. To a storage unit that has his shop and we have to go through it.

So [00:09:00] I taught a class, I taught a class in Hollywood that I took seven LP cases and seven double 45 cases, and a two piece calaphone to every week, every Monday night. Um, and then, and then we went to cassettes and you bought these little cassettes that were three minutes. And I would just put the same thing on both sides so I could stick it in the machine, hit rewind and it would be ready to go.

And then we went, norm turned me on to mini discs

, these little discs, and that was a, that was my favorite actually. 'cause you could change the order just with a few touches. So when I put a show together for my kids, I could just reorder it, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they didn't skip as opposed to CDs, which could skip.

Now nowadays, uh, I run this whole class with all the tunes that are in that book are on our website. Um, we run the whole class off our website and there's 400 plus songs on there. People come up to me and say, oh, can you do this dance? We did, did it today. [00:10:00] And I don't, we don't have it in the book. I don't have it on my computer.

I go to YouTube and there it was. And a lot of times there's, there's four or five different versions. Oh, I don't like that one. I don't like, oh, that's the one. Go ahead, do that one. So, you know, it's, again, it's learning how to cut. Cut things off of YouTube and there's, there's a way. Um, but now it's all, it's all digital.

It's all digitized. As I said, I'm going to this storage shed and I just, his daughter's coming down and I said, get a great big dumpster because we're gonna pull out four or five archival copies and nobody wants folk dance records. I mean, I, I, I donated seven boxes of records to the vinyl shop in Morrow Bay, my mom's stuff.

Nat, king Cole, Dean Martin, all this stuff like that. They loved it. It was wonderful. Nobody wants folk dance records. I mean, one, they're very specific, you know, for folk dancing, but two, they're always printed on the, the cheapest. I mean, the shops [00:11:00] would, would melt down the vinyl and reprint, but they didn't take the labels off.

There'd be paper in the, in the recording. There's one recording. There's a, the, uh, a dance that I always open with when I go on masterclasses around the country. 'cause it's, it's good. Gets me side two, band two. I'm on 1 0 2. LP skipped every single pressing skipped because it had a piece of paper in the original.

So yeah, nowadays it's YouTube. I mean, it's amazing what you can, what you can find. They'll ask for a dance. Um. That's not part of my repertoire. I haven't done, I'll go to YouTube, I'll find it. Uh, I'll go to, uh, Stockton Folk Dance Camp has a wonderful syllabus collection that's accessible. Uh, you go, 'cause I'm, I'm a stickler for trying to find the original teacher the way it was originally done.

Um, and I can usually find it there, or Folk Dance Federation has a website with, with dance notes and they do have some of the music. Um, [00:12:00] it used to be. You relied on the dance notes, written notes, and, and countries around the world have had their, Romania had like 10 different ways of notating dances, you know?

Um, but nowadays with video, I mean, you know, I, on my book I have real, I think well written dance description, but I also have a video of the kid dances being done. I mean, that's the key. So it's, yeah, we're in that age of digitized and video

You may remember that I had another guest on here, Anastasia Verdoljak, who talked about performance folk dance in episode 29. She got pretty detailed on the lengths the performance groups go to in order to bring each culture to life. As long as there have been different groups of people, there's likely been dance.

So what constitutes folk dance and what would differentiate a folk dance group from any other dance group?

/ folk dancing really took off in the summer of the 19th, 1930s, mostly in the 1940s after World War ii. Um, and it was international [00:13:00] and it was to really all over a lot of Italian. European, a lot of European, um, I call what we do traditional recreational dance folk, which is the folk, because traditional means that dances represent a people place or time.

Recreational means the basis of dance is social, so it precludes ceremonial dance. Ritualistic dance, which in a sense limits our parts of the world that we can readily from which we can do dances. We, we teach every, everyone, we approach with respect for the culture. We do 'em with the way that people of that culture would do them, even if there's somebody made them up.

But if they made 'em up in a believable of that culture, fashion, then it's acceptable to us. And we dance that, uh, in the 1960s. Balkan dancing really became very, very popular. And that's has, has prevailed. Um. A lot of the dance and, and, and because it's circle dances, you don't need a partner, uh, usually.

And, and, uh, it just, it lends itself to more [00:14:00] people being involved.

A lot of Israel, a lot of Greek, a lot of Bulgarian, a lot of Romanian. Uh, Israeli Turkish, Greek Macedonian, Serbia, Bulgaria, Czech Croatian, Turkish Romani, , a novelty, novelty dance. So that doesn't, we don't ascribe that to a culture. Portuguese, French. Albania, mold ion.

Um the ju This dance is from Western Sahara.

Particularly for us, because of the mostly circle dances, and then that's the most popular you get into Western Europe. If you go general folk dancing. You'll get German, Swedish, a lot of Scandinavian, uh, French, um, some Spanish, um, some Basque, and then you get Mexican. Uh, general folk dancers are richer in Latin dance and South American dance because a lot of it's European influence and it's couple dances.

Um, so it was, it is a very weak spot for me 'cause I don't do a lot of couple [00:15:00] dances with kids. Um. A lot of America and the contra and you know, uh, I think, you know, Congress, a lot of states has declared that square dancing should be the, their national dance or their state dance, or it should be the national dance.

And I disagree. I think country dances should be, 'cause they were done first. We have documentation of them done in the early 16 hundreds. Uh, we know they were done because the teachers get getting thrown into jail. Um, not for, not for dancing per se. For dancing on the wrong day. On Sunday or on Thursday.

Thursday was a second Sabbath, so you couldn't dance. And then, uh, but you have, you know, an increase in cotton Mather wrote, one of 'em wrote, I forget which one. An arrow against profane and promiscuous dancing drawn from this quiver of the scriptures. But at any said, proper dancing is acceptable. It would be starting to precluded with it, like be precluding laughter.

It was GY kendle [00:16:00] dancing. Mixed, MIXT, that's a man and a woman dancing together. But in a general folk dancing now, if you go general folk dancing now, 75% will be, line dances will be Eastern European dances.

and then there's some of like the umbrella of international also would include Scottish country and English country as well. Set dances IRO was French Canadian and a Bulgarian expert, but he did teach some dances and his wife France is still teaching, um, e passed away last year. Um, and she, but she's still teaching and she teaches a lot of, of dances from Brittany man, Lou Lampo and things like that.

/ it is a matter of learning the culture of the dance. And that's, I keep coming back that the word, but I think that's a paramount, um, key to what we do is understanding the culture. This is the way the people would move and it's so fun to be a chameleon

there are dances that, yeah, that dance has these steps and you learn those [00:17:00] steps to that music. there's also we often refer to village dances are sometimes really repetitious. Um, 'cause they're kind of meant to be, uh, the village people go out , and they're simple enough that you can gossip about your neighbor at the same time

a really important feature.

there's been other teachers that they, I they'll teach dances that I go, no, it just doesn't, yeah, it doesn't feel right. I, I actually, um, I'm afraid about folk dancing. For folk dancing. I think it's suffering. It's going to suffer, and it is suffering from people that make up dances that don't reflect the culture.

Um, there's movement exercises to nice music, and it's okay if you call it that. But if you call it of that people like say it's, this is a Croatian dance 'cause it's a beautiful Croatian song, but they're not steps Croatians would do. And I think that's, that's, I think pe folk dancing has flourished because of the, the connection to culture and people and, [00:18:00] you know, the music fits it and the dance feels right.

And, uh, I, I worry, I honestly worry about the future of it. And then being water essentially watered down.

One thing that super intimidates me is going to country western bars where I know there will be line dancing. It is crazy to me when a song comes on and a bunch of people flood the dance floor and are all doing the steps in sync, but also by themselves. Another place this is happening that's a little more modern is

with Korean music.

Sometimes it feels like the dancing is as strong a part of the scene as the songs themselves. I kind of feel the same thing about folk dance. And we talked a little in this interview about the parallels between folk dance and country line dance. There are thousands of folk songs and for a lot of them there are specific steps that you perform.

what you do when you come folk dancing is you build a vocabulary. You know what a yemenite step is. You know what a two step is. Uh, the trick question, how many steps in a two step three? Um. And it's just you, uh, new people that I see coming [00:19:00] here. We have one person who's just been three or four times and I told her, you know, you build a vocabulary.

You say, oh, I know that, I know the next three counts 'cause I know that step. I know a grapevine, I know where it's gonna go. And that's how people get involved. So predominantly this group, um, will do, will do Israeli and Balkan, uh, Eastern European circle dances mostly done in a circle. Um. We evolved through Covid, through dancing with masks and not holding hands in our circle, and we progressed.

We're beyond that a little bit now, although we still do a lot of the dances without holding hands. It just, it, you know, it's okay. It, it lends itself. Um. But I think what people, my one thing I tell people when they come in is they, the one rule we have, diehard rule is you can't be perfect. You have to make mistakes.

'cause if you came in and you were just perfect, you'd annoy people. You know? 'cause they've been dancing for years and we still make mistakes. I just corrected a mistake today that I've been [00:20:00] doing for months with this group, is I went down south and danced and went uh oh, I'm doing that step wrong. Um, so, and that's it.

It's just a matter of really building up vocabulary steps and you can join in.

Just to understand that, uh, any new thing can be intimidating somewhat. Um, if someone is interested in starting, there are groups that are strictly for beginners, so if you can find that situation, that's an easier entry point. There's also a lot online. Speaking of videos online. There's a lot of groups that do zoom dancing.

Um, so, or there's videos of the dances. So it's, you know, that's, that's a good entry point as well, you know, in your living room, you know, with your computer or your tv, and just see what you can do there. There's also different levels, like there's a level of being able to follow a dance and there's the level of being able to lead a dance.

Um. Um, and then teach a dance. [00:21:00] So, you know, you don't have to be able to lead a dance or teach a dance. You can follow a dance. Um, if you know, like Billy, you were saying the vocabulary, you have your Yemeni, you have your grapevine, all those things just like, you know, you build one, build upon the other, so keep it up and you keep going and you find a supportive group.

/

I recorded this episode a while ago and it was different from my usual format. My quote unquote guest is a whole group of folk dancers. I actually went on site to do this interview and it was a group interview. As you may know, if you've listened to this podcast, I'm not a professional at this. I do all my own editing.

I don't have a team or anything. I'm learning all of this as I go. Well, something happened with my audio setup while I was on site. This episode really stretched the limits of my editing skills. Some might even say exceeded them, but I really wanted to share this conversation.

Not [00:22:00] only are these absolutely delightful people, but the subculture of folk dance is a special one that I feel like more people should know about.

If you are enjoying this exploration into folk dance, please consider following or subscribing on your podcast platform. If you love learning about music and culture, generally I send out a newsletter with something cool I learned

when digging into that episode's subculture. And if you're listening in the future, no worries. You can browse the archives. Head over to zeitgeist academy.com/radio to sign up.

we would do anything to go dancing. My mother and I would do anything to go dancing.

I would wake up in the morning and I'd on a Sunday and I call my mother up and say, you want to go dancing tonight in Fresno? And she said, yeah, but how are we going to get the men to go? So I told her, golly, I really want to go tonight. And so she, um, I said, leave it to me, I'm gonna go out and talk to Dad.

So I'd go out and I told Dad, I said, Hey Dad, um, you know Sherman's thinking about going [00:23:00] folk dancing in Fresno tonight, you wanna go? And he said, Oh, he is? And I said, Yeah. You want to go? He said, yeah, yeah, we could do that. So then I said, good. So then I'd go in and I'd tell mom. I said, dad said he's going to go.

So then I'd go home and talk to Sherman. And I'd say, hey, Sherman, dad wants to go folk dancing in Fresno tonight. You want to go? He says, he does. And I say, yeah. And so that's how we finagle the men to get us to go to Fresno dancing. Oh my gosh, we had such a terrible time because mom and I loved to dance.

And dad, every time he got up to Fresno, he'd have more fun than anybody. They'd see us come through the door and they'd put corrido on for him. And he would head out to the floor with my mother and dance corrido.

It's funny, I took, I studied with San Francisco Ballet for a little bit. And, uh, really intensive class. Three hours a day, five days a week for six weeks. Um, I worked at the newspaper. I worked from midnight [00:24:00] to seven 30 and had to be ballet by eight. Um, and I went to a summer camp afterwards and I was teaching a Macedonian dance to a friend of mine and I was teaching in, he goes, you supposed to point your toe like that?

I went, no, end of my ballet career.

One thing a lot of these folks had in common is that after a while of dancing, they wanted to share this experience with others. Nearly everyone in the group had taught folk dance at one point or another. Let's listen to some of those experiences.

in the, uh, seventies, I, I made my money, um, teaching folk dance, coffee houses in LA and then touring. I did, uh, several tours around the country, a couple back east. Um, my theory of then is I had to teach a dance three times before I had it down. And having it down means. Knowing what to say to make, that's, that's the joy of teaching, is figuring out what can I say to make them do what I want them to do or not do what [00:25:00] I don't want them to do.

I mean, that's what I went through. All, all the dances in my book. I have teaching strategies. This is the way to avoid pitfalls that I ran into when I taught it.

So, Trudy Bronson asked me to help her teach one summer and so I did and then I was asked to substitute for Shlomo Bahar and that was very flattering and I thought, well I was an elementary school teacher and I had bombed out of that.

But gerontology was something that Trudy suggested. Why don't you go and talk to the gerontologist down at L. A. City Schools. I was hired. I started going to different uh. Senior care centers and I taught folk dancing because that's all I knew how to teach seniors at the time. Uh, creative living was the other, but I started in teaching the folk dance and it caught on and I ended up having two classes.

I ended up finally [00:26:00] at the, um, Cal Poly for a while, and Norma and I taught folk dancing there. and then. I was teaching at the community center here in Los Osos, and I've just loved it.

Folk dancing started up in Hanford at the gymnasium.

And, we had a big group, mostly school teachers that were learning dances to teach their students. classes for their folk dance festivals. And we started dancing up in Fresno, and we would try to go up several times a month. And I learned a bunch of dances, like the line dances, and I would bring them back to Hanford to teach to our class.

Then I got married, and, uh, my husband, He learned to line dance and folk dance. I mean, really, he was a folk dancer. And, [00:27:00] uh, we had a folk dance club there and, and had a pretty good sized group and put on a big festival there one time. And then, um, when my kids were in school, I taught folk dancing there during their lunch hour.

When I moved down here within a week, I was teaching in two coffee houses at night. Um, Balkan dancing and, uh, danced with Aman till I was 27, retired and went to school for, to become a teacher. Uh, was in school for about a year and a half. And, uh, I was in, I was, had full classes. They, they hired me and very.

Various nefarious ways, but I ended up teaching for 37 years in Los Angeles Unified school district Magnet Magnet schools. Uh, dance was our PE and I had performing groups. Uh, I taught K through eight for 19 years at 32nd Street, USC magnet [00:28:00] and 6 7 8 at Milliken Magnet, uh, in the Valley for 18 years. My group there.

Our final year we did a full show by ourselves, my, just my classes and we did suites from Bulgaria, Hungary, north Africa, west Africa, Ali, Mexico, 1890s America, Polynesia, Polynesian set, uh, Samoan and Hawaiian. Uh, and it was a great career. I had a wonderful career. I really enjoyed it.

And uh, my wife. Got me on Facebook to keep tabs of kids. I would, my stu their kids, they're in their forties now. Um, the really does, the really alarming thing is one of my students just retired. Huh. Um, and so anyway, it was a, it was a great career. I, and I retired here eight years ago. We had been coming up to visit Ver and Norm for several years.

We had met them at Mendocino Folklore Camp, a folklore camp that I went to for 55 years. Um, and just, uh, [00:29:00] maybe two or three times a year we'd come visit and I just knew this is where I wanted to retire. I always wanted to retire next to a big university in a small town. Um, so when people are honking at you on the street, they're saying hello, you know, but you have wonderful sports and arts and all the things that a big university brings.

So when I retired here, I was here a few weeks and, uh. It was just recognized that I had a big background and so I started teaching this group.

They had busing in the schools and there were a lot of fights. And so they bused a lot of kids to our schools and there were, so I volunteered to teach folk dancing during lunch hour and, um, and it worked out great. I had my own little group and they put on a big, um, Folk Dance Festival for all the parents, and my group got to perform, and they did great.

Then I taught, um, 4 H'ers. My mother's club did, because we were all [00:30:00] dancers.

Of course, I had to ask about some zeitgeist or special moments. When you have a literal lifetime of memories with a scene, it can be hard to pick one. I'll let the folk dancers go first. Then I'll share mine at the end.

I have a scrapbook in my mind of dance, of of moments.

Uh, joy mentioned and Jeano with whom she danced back. He's a Hungarian dancer, and I met him in the, in 1960, probably six I think, or five, um, when he came over after the revolution in Hungary, having fought in the revolution. I. Um, brilliant, brilliant dancer. Macho, I mean, the definition, definition of macho.

He would do exhibition with his 20 foot bull whip and things like that. You know, he wouldn't grow a mustache until his first son was born Hungarian. He could, he could pop the cork from a wine bottle by hitting the bottom of the bottle and the would pop out. So, so I was, so, I was, I was doing a dance.

There's a dance style called, and it's a military dance in a sense. They [00:31:00] would go from village to village. Teaching this dance, and depending on how you danced, would be they conscript you for the military and you had to understand people wanted to be, men wanted to be in the military, so they danced. So I was doing a dance called gin and andors fold.

Arms folded on the end of the room in Mendocino and I danced it. I was a teenager, and as I walked out, he just looked at me and went, good, good gin. That was it. That's scrapbook. That's a scrapbook moment. I'll never forget that moment. And the second one, the other one was, um, Romanian teacher, the director of the Romanian National Ensemble.

There's a dance in Romania called Tita. And Tita is fascinating because the music, the singer and the dancer are not on the same count. To dance, to dance in Tita properly, you have to be slightly behind the beat, you know, just like the beat will go beat, step beat, step beat. So I'm dancing Tita with [00:32:00] Bev, man, one of the greatest dance partners I've ever had.

Beverly. And, uh, we dance and he's, he comes up afterwards and he goes, you, you know, in Tita there were 50 couples dancing in the room. You, you know, in Tita at breakfast the next day I walked by and he goes. You, you know, invert scrapbook moment

Here I've been coming two years and look at what I learned today. Another deeper level it's a process and it's a beautiful process and I urge everybody to give it a try for a couple of times and don't get discouraged if it doesn't work right away. How, what a high is to be able to do the jazz step, the yemenite step, the grapevine, and to. Do, uh, one of my favorite things is the sway step, and I didn't have this vocabulary. I didn't have these skills two years ago, and I have it now. So little by [00:33:00] little it has created a much deeper person for myself, the vocabulary.

But you can just go to the moon and back with this kind of opportunity.

I don't remember the name of the dance, but it was a very fast and tricky Romanian dance that I did with three, two other women. And it was such a connection between the three of us that stands out like something really special.

And it was years ago it was at least 10. Um, I've had quite a few of those, but that one stands out the most

Um, yeah, mine is a bit of a collage as well. Uh, for me, there's something rich about, um, that we've hit on is the intergenerational aspect of folk dancing. So I mentioned that. I learned it from my mother. I remember going to. A festival with my mother and going on the bus there. That was a special time. And then I was at a festival and I was six months expecting [00:34:00] my second daughter, um, a second baby at the time, I didn't know it was a daughter, my beautiful daughter Megan.

And, uh, I danced. I Bulgarian dances as much as I could until my body said, you better go leg down. And of course then my child came out and she was a dancer. Isn't that interesting? Um, and my granddaughter, um, I actually had my, one of my granddaughters in a pouch and danced with her. Um, and so all of my grandchildren, I have four now, and I do what I can to pass that on to them.

So the inter-generational aspect of it is really precious.

My zeitgeist moment for this episode happened the last time I went folk dancing. My husband did a lot of performance folk dance when he was young, and every once in a while his troop will do reunion dances. By this time, his teachers are getting up [00:35:00] there in age. One of his teachers, by the way, is Teddy Walter Beak.

Remember back in the beginning of the episode when Billy said he had to be taller than the shortest lady to join the dance group? And thank goodness it was Teddy Walter Beak. This was the same teddy. She's a bird of a woman. I doubt she's five feet tall, so Billy's story is absolutely hilarious. Her husband, Al, is not that much taller and basically deaf at this point. So we're at this reunion dance and there was al out on the dance floor.

He can't hear a thing anymore, but he told everyone All I need is the first step. He doesn't even have to be told what dance it is. He just needs that first step. And let me tell you, he was lock step in sync with. Everybody else and you could see his feet were moving in all these complex patterns.

He still absolutely knew all the steps.

I found this moment really inspiring. And this goes back to the intergenerational comments a few of the dancers made. There were kids at this too, and it was really cool to see 10 year olds dancing these complex [00:36:00] dances along with the adults.

And I love seeing kids getting involved in new musical scenes, especially folk scenes like this one. But as someone in kind of the middle of, my lifetime, it's nice for me to look up and see role models too. It's really healthy for me to see examples of people much, much older than me having fun. I think sometimes it can be a little scary to think about getting older, but when you see these people in their sixties, seventies, even eighties, possibly even older, having these amazing times, folk dancing, uh, and just these big smiles, having the time of their lives.

I don't know. It helps me. It's inspirational to me and it helps me feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself. So thank you Al for that amazing moment and thank you. Huge thank you to the Los Osos Bay folk dancers, for taking the time to do this interview with me. And thanks to you for listening. [00:37:00] We'll see you next time.

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