Hey everyone! We're almost done! We have two weeks and nine calls left until graduation! This week, dancing will be in Lobdell and early walkthroughs will be upstairs in 20 Chimneys. We'll be dancing until 11 instead of 10:30, and the extra dancing will be class-level, so class members are welcome to join in! Eric Mulder will be calling progressive squares, where the boundaries between squares become fuzzy or nonexistent. It will be fun! I put the badge order in last Friday. If you ordered a badge, you need to give me money: $6 for a pin-back badge and $9 for a magnet-back. Next week is graduation. We need to pick some hacks for the club's hack tip. I'd like the voting to go quickly in class meeting, since we have other stuff to talk about, so I'll go over our ideas here and we can discuss them now and then just vote in the meeting. (I meant to send this out in the middle of last week but then I got hosed, sorry about that.) 1. Dancing backwards: I think this would be too dangerous, since no one would be able to see where they were going. A similar but safer idea would be to do "nose dancing." To do this, everyone turns one wall left or right and then sticks their elbow out to make a "nose." Then you dance the entire tip sideways from how you should be facing. This is actually harder than going backwards, and by the way, you can't really use hands. More information at http://www.tiac.net/~mabaker/square-games.html (search for "nose dancing"). Another idea is that Ted can ask dancers to "undo" the previous call, which would be a little bit of backwards dancing without total chaos. Or, on an undo, we could have everyone u-turn back and walk backwards along the path of the call they just did. 2. Repeating the previous call out loud: I'd be worried that this would get old quickly. 3. Hopping on one foot 4. Only allowed to have weight on one foot 5. Blindfolded: all 8 people is a bad idea. The maximum I think a square can support is 2 or 3. 6. Dancing with earplugs: while having all 8 people with earplugs wouldn't be actively dangerous, it probably wouldn't be all that interesting. =) I don't really know whether dancing with earplugs is harder than dancing blindfolded, so I'd go with no more than 2 or 3 people per square. 7. Some people blindfolded/some people with earplugs: if two many people are handicapped, this will be impossible. I'm not sure what the right number is, but I think that any one person should only have a blindfold OR earplugs. Two blindfolds and two earplugs is probably the most a square could tolerate and still have fun, and one of each might be better. 8. Gemini, tandem, or some combination: see http://www.tiac.net/~mabaker/square-games.html (search for "gemini"). 9. Crossed hands: I'd be worried that this would get boring quickly. 10. Abbreviated call names: I actually think this would be too easy. 11. Carry a (hard-boiled) egg on a spoon: a) eggs have the potential to be messy even if they're hard-boiled, so maybe a ping pong ball or something similar would work better. b) is everyone in the square going to do this? Because if not, then that's pretty boring for the dancers who don't get something to carry. 12. Chant the alphabet, or something else that everyone knows, while dancing: This might be hard and confusing but not that much fun. I'm not sure. 13. Pass an object: a) This isn't actually very hard or interesting, and b) the class did this to the club just last semester. 14. Holding or passing an object under your chin: When would they pass it? Perhaps in a singing call we could give oranges (for example) to the head girls (for example) and every time you swing you have to pass it along to the next person (without hands). 15. Hot potato: the club made the class do this a few terms ago with a beach ball. It was kind of a disaster in that no actual square dancing took place. But maybe if we made the club do it instead, it would go better. 16. Any time you end in a right-hand wave, switch it to a left hand wave: this is an interesting idea. Would we also switch to a right hand wave if the previous call ends in a left-hand wave? We need something for the patter and something for the singer. From this list, I think the ones that would work best for a singer are passing an object under your chin, hot potato, and hopping on one foot. Discuss! Dana