billeyler | Montreal overview

beldamon did a concise wrapup of the square dance portion of the Montreal event, and I really can't add much more to that from a dancer point of view.

abqdan played tourist most of the trip, except when we met for meals in the breaks, mostly with Anne or Don, and one time with Larry White. We did get a treat and met Ron Masker's Montreal significant other for breakfast in the Village...Daniel (pronounced 'Don-YELL')is a hunky 40-something French Canadian who was in hog-heaven with the week of Pride activities and spectating a number of the Games events. He did tour us around Mont-Royal (it's a real mountain!) for a couple of hours before I had to head back downtown to call a 1pm session. He was happy to practice his English, which was extremely good, compared to our smattering of high-school French. Ron did good and I hope this relationship works for him.

The weather was what the entire Northeast was going through...record heat, high humidity and terrific thunderstorms. The Tuesday night thunderstorm hit when we were about to dine with Larry at a place in the Village and was quite spectacular. Later, I heard that two people were killed from the storm and 400,000 or so were without power, with hurricane force micro-bursts from the storm shredding trees and downing power lines (they call it Hydro there).

Although it did rain on and off, the weather calmed down to something in the 80s Friday though. You COULD avoid the weather almost entirely by staying in the underground cities they've built to combat the cold blasts of winter.

All three of us callers felt disjointed when we got there, since there really wasn't an event contact other than Chris the sound-guy. He didn't know anything about square dancing, and they had set up chairs on a platform for judging, huge speakers for music, and didn't have anywhere for the callers to be. Happily, Chris was very amenable to our suggested changes, and even let us hooked up a Hilton MA150 so we could control the sound a bit. He only popped in at the beginning and end of the dances to make sure everything went alright.

I think it was Thursday, the airconditioning went out. That was awful, but we made it through the evening. I was sweating on the stage, so I can imagine how unpleasant it must have been for the dancers. We finally convinced the management to fix the thermostat.

We all knew that with 65 dancers registered it would be thinning the energy to have two halls as scheduled, so we all called either in duet, trio, or solo for the whole 18 hours of the event, keeping the breaks shorter, and trying to find something for everyone that was there. As callers, we didn't really know who danced what level, so we had to do polls to find out if there was enough for even an A1 tip.

We were thrilled that we had visitors stop by. I don't know WHY they stopped by, but their energy was the highlight of the dancing when we got them up to do intro dancing. I think I did two of the intros and Anne and Don each did one. I know a number of the experienced dancers were chatting them up, so maybe some positive reinforcement happened. I didn't get to talk to them 1:1, but I think there were a number of Australians and Germans, and maybe some local folk from Montreal.

As Mark said, it was difficult to do any Advanced or C1 dancing, since many of the dancers were off doing other events related to the much larger OutGames. I think we only had one C1 tip, and that was Wednesday at some point. Most of the Advanced was A1-Lite, and we may have only called 4 Advanced tips. By Friday, most of the A/C dancers were off doing other parts of the OutGames.

I lost it at one point during the last Mainstream tip on Thursday night. Somehow, the music I selected for the final singer (On the Road Again) started subtly speeding up while we were calling. This was on MY laptop and I didn't have a clue what to do to fix it, since we were in the midst of the song. It went from about 128 bpm to 160 bpm by the end of the song, and I was laughing so hard, I couldn't see the dancers through my tears...we made it to the end somehow. Anne and Don were laughing, too, and hopefully it wasn't TOO obvious to the dancers that something had gone technically wrong!

Except for the specators that passed through the hall, I had no feeling of the OutGames at all, since the events were scattered through the city and we were away from all of it. Even the "Cultural" events were scattered...the chorus festival, the leather cotillion, the c/w dancing...all were either over by the time we arrived or were in distant venues that we wouldn't get to.

There was a major challenge for us. One of the local straight dancers who came was totally blind. Not only was it challenging for us to call choreography that wouldn't get him disoriented, but for the dancers in his square, some of them didn't know what to DO with a blind dancer to give him clues on final orientation. I could tell that Roger (the blind dancer) COULD dance, and had an appreciation for the beat of the music. His woman friend and he even danced a waltz during one of the breaks, whereas most of the square dancers know nothing except squares. I couldn't tell what his female partner was saying, but everytime she missed a call, she would simply stop, start frantically shaking her head NO, and it looked like she was babbling to herself. That was pretty scary, since it was impossible for the square to carry on. Breakdowns during the Mainstream and Plus were the rule, rather than the exception, no matter what any of the three of us did. Anne had one instance where it took a couple of dancers over a MINUTE to get into a position where they could do a "Ladies Trade." Eek.

Michael Jorgensen from Denmark stopped by. Although he is no longer actively calling or dancing, he was in Montreal for the rowing competition AND apparently won a Gold medal at that event! His picture was in a local paper kissing someone after he won. He did dance a couple of tips...and since the OutGames in 2009 (or is it the Gay Games?) will be in Copenhagen, he's going to pursue having square dancing as an event again, WITH intro to new dancers. I would like to see some competitive square dancing, with judging, like the teen groups that are still left do, but that would have to take some coordinated effort, and Denmark being a VERY long way from the bulk of dancers, good luck to that!

I did enjoy as always working with the super-calm Anne, and Don and I got along well. Both of them are full-time callers, with 30 years of experience, so I felt a bit like the new kid, with just random flyin calling and one-night-a-week club calling. Not sure if the dancers could tell the difference, though! We all were there for the 18 scheduled hours, instead of the 10 hours were were each booked for, since we made it up as we went along. None of us called every tip, so it worked out nicely, and we weren't as exhausted as we would have been at a convention.

The most impressive bit for me of the weekend was that you would have had to be deaf and blind NOT to know the OutGames were in town. From the OutGames banners on every pole at the airport, to colorful signage through town, to videos of some of the events in the subways, to extensive newspaper and TV coverage, SOMEONE did a remarkable job on promotion and coverage. I was hugely impressed...even the GALA 2004 chorus fest in Montreal had no real coverage, and there were over 6000 of us in town for that.

Both our trips back and forth were completely smooth on the no-frills American Airlines. Except for the juice I had, the only snack was a packet of snack mix we got on the Dallas to Albuquerque, which of course Danny couldn't have. I only slept about 2 hours the night before we came back, so I operated in a fog all of Saturday and went to bed at the amazing hour of 8:30pm. Whew.