[Update: I found some videos JF took at a contra a few years ago featuring a portly me in a green overall shorts outfit that must be seen to be believed. I'll post them after my walk or sometime this morning.]

Penny wanted to know what kind of dancing we were doing. It's called contra dancing. It's a pretty simple kind of dancing done to a kind of blue-grass, old timey music. Around here, we always dance to live music. Every week, at the Vintage Theater in Winston-Salem, on lovely hardwood floors in air-conditioned bliss, we have live music to dance to.

The dances are called and taught. That means that everyone lines up and then the caller walks them through the moves at least once. And then the music starts and the caller yells out the moves until everyone is dancing seamlessly. There are a group of standard moves, not unsimilar to square dancing, such as swing your partner and alemand left. There's also...one of my favorites..."gypsy." In that move, you look your partner in the eye and circle them, not touching. Contra dancing is flirting and eye contact and playing with people.

At the beginning of every contra dance, there is usually a half-hour for the total beginners to learn the basic moves. One of the experienced dancers takes the group through a sample call and they practice a little. But the atmosphere and the culture of contra is that you don't have to be really good, you can stumble, you can forget where you are. Everyone will sort of push you and grab you and get you there. The other part of the culture I like is that you're supposed to change partners, not dance with your mate or with one person all night. This is one difference from, say, Salsa. Oh, and since there are almost always more women than men, the women do most of the asking.