Spiked crowd

July 27, 2007

The evening started at Al Casbah with Sergio, Sebastian, Euvian, Marina, Mimi, Zern and Cyrille. The table was booked for 7:30, but I did not get there until 8:10 so others ordered for me. The food was mediocre, and I did not eat much. Some others apparently did not feel very good afterwards for dancing and blamed it on the cous cous. The intermediate stop was the Fountain Inn, which was okay – Mimi and Marina did not join us for this excursion. We took a table for a change. The outing to Club Salsa started at 11 without Zern.

Initially, things looked promising. Zhenzhi and Mimi (along with Mimi’s friends) arrived before us, but Mimi did not stay long. Ivan and Nina were surprise attendants – it was like a Thursday for them except much more of the same. Natalia and her friend arrived shortly thereafter. There was a big crowd too – unfortunately very small on people who can dance in any style and very big on heavy alcohol drinkers - Sharon ended up behind the bar. I don’t know where these people came from, and I have doubts about such thing being sustainable. The crowding did not abate until well after 1, and by then everyone else had given up for one reason or another.

The music was problematic too. The songs were initially too same and too familiar and occasionally with very poor sound. After about half an hour, I couldn’t bear to dance anymore so I took myself out. When another very familiar song came on with awful sound, I decided to visit the empty DJ booth to see what the problem was. While fiddling with some knobs with Serap and Shila (acting DJ) gathered around, I noticed that the distortion at times sounded like a feedback loop. I decided to turn down the microphone level, which seemed to help a little. Then I turned the microphone off, which further improved the sound quality. Incidentally the microphone was sitting right next to the CD player on the left side and was not being used because it was “behaving” badly. I told Shila to try using the left CD player now – it worked fine. Unfortunately the music problem was not quite over. The next set of songs were poor in overall quality, which prompted me to tell Shila that he now needed to pick better songs. After 2-3 misses, song choices improved. However, there were a lot of tracks with skipping problems later. The number of CDs in Shila’s case was pretty small – less than 20 – not much variety. Apparently Vishal is away – according to Marina for 5 weeks (!) – so this could mean being subjected to a very limited set of songs (possibly with a lot of skipping problems) for a while. I can’t believe Vishal did not ask me for help. Oh well.

Most of the dances I had were fine. There weren’t many dances, space was tight and a few of the people on the floor were pretty rude (The worst case involved a woman walking in between Ivan and Nina while they were dancing with each other – I can’t remember if they were doing a shine or just doing basic without holding hands at the start of the song. I already had a pretty poor opinion of her after trying to dance with her earlier – she did not follow, she openly questioned what I was dancing (as opposed to wrestling I presume), and when I decided to go into open position and do some shine after too many instances of not getting my leads followed she walked out. Not my loss, but for tonight she seemed to fit into the crowd just fine.)