Finally catching up on my sleep enough to write a blog post about HOW AWESOME IS ALL-BALBOA WEEKEND?! OMG YAY TEH AWSUMZ!!1!
OK, maybe not quite all the way caught up. Heh.
But for real, it was a great weekend of Balboa dancing. As it always is. You never knew you could have so much fun in a non-descript Holiday Inn in a suburban strip mall, but walking in that place is like coming downstairs on Christmas morning. Balboa dancers everywhere, old and new friends coming and going, and this year, more vintage vendors than ever, spilling out of their hallway almost into the lobby.
Amazing social dancing every night, as late as you can keep your feet moving, with Jonathan Stout’s Campus 5 live until after 1am and the best Balboa DJs in the world after that. We shut it down on Sunday (they started taking up the floor at 5am and turned off the music), and managed 3am or later the other nights. We tried to leave one night and it took us half an hour just to get off the floor because the DJ (Jo Ann Coker of Seattle) kept playing songs too great to ignore!
Every year there’s something in the competitions that blows my mind — sometimes it’s the winner, sometimes not, but the last two years it has been. (If you haven’t seen Laura & Jeremy’s first place ACBC dance from 2011, go check it out.) This year, it was Andreas Olsson and Teni Lopez-Cardenas winning the ACBC by basically doing impossibly awesome shit for 2 straight minutes.
And the classes were particularly good this year for me. I have a whole raft of things swimming around in my following brain, not least Kate’s story of how she grudgingly embraced her inner diva and let her out to play when she dances. Stan and I are going to be working through all this stuff for the next few months, and we hope you’ll come out and play with us while we do. We’ll share. See you soon, dancing Bal!
(and we’ll see you next June in Cleveland at All-Balboa Weekend, right?)
