Welcome to the party

May 14, 2007

Considering the fact that I thought about attending Joe's class tonight, I arrived rather late - around 10:20 - directly from work. Joe was long gone, but I was a little surprised to find Rajiv talking to Danie as well as Jane and Richard a little further away closer to the DJ booth. Otherwise the dance floor was as about as full as I would have expected it to be.

I said hello to others who were dancing when I came in - like Ed and Heinz. Ed and I talked in some length about SOS last night, which was finally back to its normal glory after a series of subpar weeks in April. Ed had been accustomed to what I thought of as junior varsity version of SOS all April so he was surprised and perhaps a little intimidated by higher standard.

I don't have a crystal clear idea of how I coped when I was new to SOS - I think I must have asked women who were not being asked as often while trying to dance as much as possible (nearly non-stop) and doing my best. I was probably using the same move with everyone and disguising it by essentially not dancing with anyone more than once per evening. The habit of dancing only once per evening per person at SOS has stuck though - except for rare exceptions. I suppose I do the same in Cambridge although I break this rule quite frequently with rather large number of people.

Vishal debuted a new CD full of nice and sometimes very surprising songs. I think I recognized a little over half of the songs although I don't know the song titles of all. Thus my listing of songs here does not fully show the quality. I think it included Trompeta Y Trombone (Ray Barretto), My Favorite Things (New Swing Sextet - I danced with Jane). The biggest surprise of sort was Welcome To The Party (Har You Percussion Group) - Vishal thought about skipping the song and I had to tell him to keep it on and see what happens.

Here's Frankie Martinez to Welcome To The Party - some of you must have seen this already.

Anyhow, it gave Richard and Jane as well as Rajiv and Danie to try dancing to this track. I tried doing some shines and see what happened.

I probably liked the song that came on after Welcome To The Party even more. It reminded me a little bit of Cairo. Call it Mambo or Latin Jazz - I bet Haihan, Agnes, Steph et al would have liked it a great deal.

Vishal did skip the next song (Happy Birthday). The song after that was nice too - I had my last dance of the evening with someone I had never seen before prior to tonight. It was my second with her tonight - she seemed nice although light to being almost a wisp.

I left the club as Vishal turned down the volume for Vacilon (Lebron Brothers). I think Vishal was trying to make a statement that he could out-Mambo Sally and me if he wanted. Of course, I think I could push the boundary even more - even if I can't say I would have dared to play Welcome To The Party on Fridays anytime soon.

MacBooks are updated today. Yay. I might be getting a new laptop sooner rather than later. The middle model update includes 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (up from 2.0 GHz), 120 GB hard drive (up from 80 GB), and 8x SuperDrive (up from 6x) as standard.