Til The Sweat Drips From My Ballroom!

The Elk Grove Strauss Festival is Coming… 20 years now this has been going on. And can I just say how jaded I’ve become?

I remember the good ol days …. when ballroom dancing was still underground… there were no festivals…. no concessions… no expensive ticket prices… just a bunch of ballroom dancers twacked out of their minds on X, laying around the corners of a warehouse…

yeah… those were the days.

I remember spending half the night driving around in a tuxedo from map-point to map-point until finally a bunch of us just set up our own ballroom in the albertsons parking lot and blasted waltz anthems from our cars.

Styles and genres didn’t matter back then… we just wanted to dance!

but now things have changed. The popularity of ballroom dancing has increased, and along with it, the number of ballroom-related-accidents.

96 was the worst year…  a bunch of Tango-dancers, still wasted from the night before, ran over someone’s tent on the way back to their camp… after that it was decided that they couldn’t have the Tango dance floors so far removed from the main party…  on the bright side, that year marked the year that Tango was finally accepted as part of the festival… but now we have so much else to deal with… 5 different law enforcement agencies patrolling the scene… shaking down anyone with polished shoes or a rose in their teeth….

Ballroom dancing is not a crime… bad things simply happen WHENEVER large groups of people get together…

it is clear that the popularization of ballroom dancing has our police and our government afraid… that is why they have taken special measures to crack down on ballroom dancing… and in recent years they have even equated ballrooms to crackhouses and extended the fines to club-owners and banquet-masters… how can you fine the owner of a classy dance club when one of his patrons, unbeknownst to him, is seen selling quantities of Foxy Methoxy? Is it HIS fault that West Coast Swing has become associated with flagrent drug abuse and the corruption of our youth?

Well i’d be lying if i said this was the first time this has happened… history repeats itself and we are so short-sighted… in the 60′s we experimented with different ways to live and think… and the government saw it as a threat and tried to stamp it out by ridculing it…. just like is happening today… i mean when is the last time you heard ballroom dancing NOT referred to tongue-in-chique?

Before long you will see “Foxtrot Is Not a Crime” bumper stickers and you will see police raids on Ballrooms Festivals and Merengue Campouts…  but it’s just the cycle happening all over again… Everything good eventually becomes overdone and played out… and the underground inevitably dives back underground where it simmers for a while and comes back with a new strategy…

I remember a conversation i had with some random party kid in the Cha Cha room at GigaWaltz…  he said “This is so beautiful man! Look how many people come together to make this possible! I love this scene because it promotes selflessness!”

I thanked him for being so open and I gave him a water. He gave me a light show and offered me some vapor-rub. It was good times…

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