Breaking the rules

May 21, 2007

I was undecided and perhaps leaning towards not going when Cyrille asked me if I was going. Long story cut short we were there at 10. Initially we did not see a lot of people to dance with, but it wasn't so bad. Andrea was there with improved posture - something I first noted last night. So was the new light follow - I wondered before if she was too light, but too light is probably preferable to too heavy if nothing else because they are rarer. In any case, it's nice to dance with people and see them improve over time - certainly better than seeing people get worse and/or develop poor or annoying habits for whatever reason. Vishal's favorite practice partner was there too - arguably the best of the mature ladies in the scene and still getting better all the time. Lovely Jane was there with Richard too. Danie and Olga were there too of course, but Danie was still not recovered and Olga changed her shoes before I got a chance to ask her for a dance. Cyrille and I talked about staying for maybe half an hour or an hour; we ended up staying a bit longer.

The music was not as great as last Monday, which is just as well. It would have been a shame to listen to the same CD two weeks in a row even if it's good. It also gave Vishal an opportunity to test out songs from the past - even if most of the golden oldies from 5 years ago were not any good by Cyrille or my standard. I was probably most pleasantly surprised by Puerto Rico (Eddie Palmieri). Cyrille found the song becoming a bit fast for his dance as well as being long - I think it's about 7 minutes long and probably is not suitable for playing every week (but I think it would be perfectly alright to play it once in a while - once 2 or 3 months perhaps). Another decent oldie not heard recently was Yamulemau (Joe Arroyo version I think). There was a song (reminded me of Marc Anthony songs such as Ahora Quien) which Cyrille liked but I found difficult - I found the breaks in the song a bit unpredictable and too many (even though the song sounded familiar, I struggled with it - Cyrille later said that you probably need to know the song pretty well to know when the breaks occur, etc).