Brit Salsafest 6 – Final night

February 5, 2006

At dinner, I said to Johnny that if I were a country, I would like to be something like Finland – neutral, well-developed and with good international reputation. Because of this blog, I was more like North Korea in the Cambridge Salsa scene – distrusted by most and disliked by many. Now, I’m somewhere in between - maybe Mexico.

I arrived at Winter Gardens at 9:50 PM for the show, meaning I managed to skip much of Paul Young’s babbling in the beginning. I think the highlight of the lineup was Swing Guys once again. I liked Lee & Shelley but there’s probably some personal bias there since I’ve taken several classes with them and like them. I might have found Leon Rose & Susana Montero interesting except that I essentially saw the same show last weekend with much better view. Salsa Dance Squad seemed to be a slightly weaker version of Tropical Gem.

It was amusing to find myself standing next to bunch of familiar faces repeatedly and not realize that they were there for the longest time. At the show, it took me almost ten minutes to realize that I was standing right next to Sally’s group, who were seated. Later in the evening, I was standing next to Tony Lara and not realizing this until he said hello to me. Tony seemed somewhat recovered but seemingly needed more rest and did not stay long. I did find out that Cambridge is the only place he’ll be stopping at in this trip; he’ll be flying back to Italy on Wednesday. Apparently, Brit Salsafest organizer(s) gave Tony a hard time when he told them that he was going to do a workshop in Cambridge.

I probably had another 30-40 dances between ~10:30 PM and 3 AM. About 1/4 were by request, and many of these were quite fun. In this trip, not counting couple of presumptive non-dancers and people from Cambridge, I had only one rejection for dance throughout the weekend. There were two long stretches of very enjoyable series of dances. The final dance was also quite fun. I’m going to miss having so much room to dance.

I’ll probably make one more post regarding the Brit Salsafest. Now, I need to get some sleep, and tomorrow is going to be another busy day.