A familiar CD or two

May 31, 2007

My old laptop sprang back to life, so I spent a little time playing with it. It's so old (5+ years) that I have no regret about getting a new one, but retrieving a small number of files I failed to back up was useful - more or less.

Between this and that, I only managed to get to Club Salsa shortly after 10. I was amused to hear a very familiar sounding CD - the one Vishal had been using a lot in recent months - the one with Micaela, Thinking Of You, Margarita, Montuno Street, Tambo, Temba Tumba Timba, Chin Chon Chow, etc. Apparently it was Sally's compilation - or so I learned when I suggested to Sally to skip the songs after Los Van Van in this particular CD.

Cyrille was a surprise no-show once again. Ivan arrived even later than I did. It felt like Ivan also left early, but perhaps it was no earlier than usual. Generally it felt like there was a relative shortage of leads tonight even though it's possible to say that there also was a good number of missing followers for reasons known and unknown to me. I thought I also thought pretty much everyone danced less than usual or perhaps practicing more instead of dancing. Sergio should be back in two weeks and might get some people to show up more consistently.

I danced a little over a dozen times with at least ten people. I was on a pretty good form - probably having a nice aftereffect of a decent Scala outing. No doubt things were also helped by my partners in seemingly receptive mood. I got one practice On2 - Cha Cha. I danced with Zhenzhi, and I thought we did quite well although the length of the song became a little problematic - I think it was the Wayne Gorbea song from the other day. The only time I came close to getting annoyed was when the old 40's or 50's version of Mambo Diablo came on, and there was no perfect dance partner available for the song. This CD probably contains La Pelota (Ray Barretto), Tumba Palo Cucuye (Wayne Gorbea), Pedregal (Justo Betancourt), Mambo Diablo (oldest of three Tito Puente versions I know of), Picadillo (Cal Tjader & Eddie Palmieri) among others. I had a dance with Sally near the end after spotting Zern dancing with her - I seem to recall seeing her dancing a lot more than usual tonight (I guess she was an exception to the trend I mentioned earlier).

I ran into yet another person from work - I didn't recognize him from either Salsa or work, but he apparently was not a first-timer.