Saturday, August 09, 2003

Music, Dancing and a Pleasant Surprise

Wow, what a fun evening. The band at the contradance was Lee Anne and her fiddle students, the same students I played with when they were first starting out, plus a bunch of younger / more beginning-level ones who only played a couple sets. But as I walked in and heard them warming up, I was surprised to hear a flute playing. I looked in and there was George! I hadn't seen him in ages. (For those of you who I know are getting confused, this is music-George from Santa Cruz, not dance-George from Stanford. I know him from back in high school when we used to bring pennywhistles to school and play between classes.) I was so excited to see him I ran home and grabbed my mandolin so I could play some tunes with him during the break (well, I said hi and everything first, of course). It was wonderful to hear him play again. He's just fantastic. I'm really out of shape, but our mini-session in the middle of the dance was a lot of fun anyway. I've got to start getting to more sessions and finding more times to play with him (and just play in general). And the band really sounded pretty good. Having George there, and Paul on piano, helped a lot of course. I even got to play the square dances with them, since the squares are usually when I take a break from dancing anyway.

There were also a couple new people at the dance, who I was happy to see since in general there are precious few people in my age group there. It turns out they're from Boston though, and they're road-tripping around the country, stopping at contradances wherever they find them. Good plan, I say. Sad though, because they were fun to dance with and they're even musicians, so they would have been neat people to have around. Oh well. Funny how people can just sort of make hit-and-run appearances in your life sometimes.

So all in all, a good night. Time for bed, though. I've got a busy day tomorrow.

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