square dancing....

I LOVE the movie "It's A Wonderful Life".  I have a very specific Christmas ritual and I watch this movie one time a year as a part of that ritual.  I have always enjoyed, and been fascinated by, the dance contest sequence.

I grew up in the age of "modern" dance when people would just wiggle around on the dance floor in front of each other and call it dancing.  No waltz, tango, or even something fun as the charelston.  Just booty shaking with the girls trying to out shake their booties from the other girls.  That was 30 years ago and the dancing hasn't gotten any better.  I know that there are some that are even worse than just booty shaking.  There are the occasional line dances that every few years pop up that everyone learns, but no structured couple dancing has ever been popular since the jitter bug in the 50's.

In the town that I grew up in there was a family that had a big country barn and they would have square dances every Saturday night.  Oh, the fun we had!  But that was 30 years ago, they stopped doing them but a few times a year and we moved to the "big" city.  My husband hates it, and I forgot about the fun that was square dancing.

The little country school that Smoochie attends has TONS of fund raisers to support the school. In the winter they have a series of square dances. This has to be the best kept secret in our area because until he attended this school I never knew there were still square dances in the area.  The band that came to the school has GROUPIES!!!! There were 300 people there from 3 different states; 7 year olds to 70 year olds!!!

No body grinding, drug abuse or foul language.  A little bit of beer drinking, but that was more to quench the thirst than anything else.  It was tons of fun.  And reminded me of the simpler time in "It's A Wonderful Life". It gave me great hope for the future that this type of family activity still is around and supported with groupies!!!

I told my husband that if these kinds of events where held in the "big" cities, they would be much better places and we probably wouldn't be in the political mess that we're in.

I'm going to start square dancing again, because

a good mother would!