Veteran square dancers (Angels) help give this year’s crop of 10 student dancers--including yours truly-- weekly lessons in the community room of Mansfield’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. The heartbeat of this stimulating activity is the dance caller, our very own Danny Beck (top left and below), whose calm, clear and very patient guidance makes these delightful sessions a rewarding experience.

SQUARE DANCING--

The morning after my weekly square dancing lesson feels like, well, the morning after. I slither out of bed and wonder how my joints got rusty overnight.

My new friend Fran Hoeppner with her radiantly soft and charming smile recently invited me to join her in this form of a life-sized, pin ball game on the dance floor.

Danny Beck is our professorial caller with his pleasantly soothing voice inviting we dancers to spin through a choreograph of moves that, to this rookie, is like trying to comprehend quantum physics in three easy lessons.

The declining remnants of my brain cells feel, on those mornings after, as if they spent the night in a nuclear-powered blender.

The veteran dancers in this training venue are called “Angels”. They flow effortlessly through a zillion variations of what I remember as a simple Do-see-do.

They will collectively Allemande left from an Ocean Wave to a Grand Square and slide smoothly into a Promenade—while I am trying to remember how to begin the Alle-mande.

Not really. That’s just how it seems. Every time my face takes on a blank rookie-dancer stare, one of the angels will whirl by and point the way. I’ll begin to stutter-step into a Rollaway with a Half Sashay and another angel will give me a boost to the next angel thus cleverly hiding my confusion.

Once in awhile, to my horror, even the efforts of angels are insufficient and one of my not-so-gallant moves will cause our square to look like it just went through the aforementioned blender.

Toleration at such transgressions appears to exist in unlimited quantities and we somehow reassemble our smoothly oiled square with the occasional whispered comment from one veteran dancer, “That was caused by another veteran dancer, not you.”

While I know in my mind that comforting remark is not likely the whole truth, it makes my heart feel good.
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Thanks Fran and thanks to the angels of the Johnny Appleseed Western Square Dance Club (sometimes referred to as the “Seeds”) for giving this rookie an encouraging peek at your marvelous world of dance.