The Flurry Festival

The Flurry is an annual event that takes place in Saratoga, New York. It's held on Valentine's Day weekend--a perfect time for everyone to immerse themselves in live music and dance. Singles and couples are welcomed, and the overlapping sessions are set up to encourage everyone to join in the fun.

Even in winters less harsh than this one has been, we all need some bucking up for our sagging spirits. Outside, it's relentlessly gray and cold. All the eating and drinking holidays have been over for more than a month. February slumps in its middle, and spring is just an idea without substance.

 Enter the Flurry Festival, where the spirit of inclusion and celebration abounds. Participants range from toddlers to the elderly. Highly-skilled musicians of all stripes accompany the multiple sessions of dance. Those who aren't booked come to make music with their peers. Impromptu concerts spring up in corridors and corners.

Walking through the corridors of the Hilton and City Center, we hear chamber and classical music, country reels, folk, swing, bluegrass, and Zydeco. As a novice, I can't name all of the kinds of music I hear or identify all of the instruments. The sounds of reeds, strings, and percussion surround us wherever we go from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.

We have our choice of dance sessions. We go to hour-long lessons in contra, Cajun, hip hop, waltz, and country dancing from different nations and cultures. Some sessions are unstructured, offering the space and music for more experienced dancers to let loose.

When we are tired, we find a lesson to observe from the chairs on the perimeter of the room. Sometimes we decide to get up and give a new dance a try. Sometimes we watch, contently, until rested, we find another place to dance.

Or we walk through those music-filled corridors and plop down to listen to jam sessions. They expand before our eyes. What starts as a duet or trio draws more and more musicians. On Saturday morning, we pass a group of about ten violinists on our way to check out a session called Waltzes by Women. When we pass that way again later, the number of violinists has grown to forty plus.

It's a privilege to be at this unusual event. Whether listening or dancing with it, music is magic, lifting us from the midwinter doldrums.

Check out flurryfestival.org  to see what you missed and plan for next year.

After The Lesson

There were more than two hundred people at the Elk's Club that night. After the dance lesson, the five-piece band that had been setting up took over. The singer got right into it with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. Her voice was terrific--smooth and nuanced. I wish I could remember her name, but my mind was on overload. The close proximity of all those dancers and their frenetic movements stunned me after my many sedentary years of sitting in the audience at the Joyce and Jacob's Pillow. And live music was something I appreciated from my seat at Lincoln Center, Tanglewood, or one of the small jazz clubs in the city. Wherever it was, I was used to being separated from the action on stage. My only participation--if you can call it that--was to clap at the end.

But my nervous system finally did begin to settle down, and I started to take in my surroundings. The single women far outnumbered the men. That was no surprise. After some one-on-one private tutoring, David said he'd be expected to ask some of the numerous single women to dance. I nodded and off he went.

Since many of the other dancers seemed focused on being seen, I watched. They were of all ages, but most entertaining were the students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. With its strong dance program, it turned out kids who danced like pros. Their sneakered feet kicked and jived, heels and toes jutting high in the air. People gave them wide berth to avoid injuries.

I was about to sit in one of the folding chairs that lined the perimeter of the floor when a man approached me, grunted, and held out his hand. Somehow, saying no thanks seemed out of the question, so I took it. He placed his other hand on my back, I did the same on his shoulder. We began to repeat the triple-step, triple-step, back-step that I had just learned. After a few (who am I kidding?--more like twenty) repetitions, my mind began to free itself from its hypnotic, held-breath, will-this-go-on-forever state. My partner and I didn't speak, which I appreciated enormously. We were just completing a turn when the song ended. He escorted me back to a seat, grunted again, bowed formally, and drifted back into the crowd.

Not too bad. Not too bad. I was soothing myself, when a woman I'd met earlier that night sat beside me.

"You did fine!" she said. (A couple of years later she told me I'd looked like a deer in the headlights.)

"I guess I followed him alright," I conceded, secretly proud.

"Yeah. I'm not sure what's wrong with him. I think he's recovering from a stroke. These dances are probably part of his rehab."

My elation deflated as I giggled to myself. His meticulously repeated movements had made him the perfect leader for me to follow. I couldn't have asked for better. But that was all I'd noticed. Self-consciousness had limited my focus.

Just then another man I didn't know approached and asked my new friend to dance. I was still laughing at myself when David returned. "There you are! I couldn't find you. Are you alright?"

"Oh yes," I answered nonchalantly. "I was just dancing with someone."

"Good! Who?

I scanned the crowd. "Oh, I don't see him now."

"How did you do?"

"Fine," I tossed off.

He and I danced together for the rest of the evening.

Decades Later

When my husband Al died, my doctor prescribed some sort of anti-anxiety medication for me. I never took the pills back then. My grief, along with its accompanying disorientation and dread,  seemed like "normal" reactions to his absence from my life. I wanted to experience them, painful as they were.

But just in case, I filled the script and put the bottle in my medicine cabinet. There it stayed on the glass shelf, half-forgotten, beside the over-the-counter aids for headaches, colds, and upset stomachs. Every once in a while I'd glimpse it and wonder what it was. I'd assume it was one of Al's medications that I'd missed when I had purged the shelves after he died. But when I took it down, I'd be surprised to read my name on the label, and back it would go behind the mirrored door.

The little white pills remained long after their expiration date had passed. They were my insurance policy against some debilitating feelings that just might overwhelm me in the coming years. Some widows who had remained single told me their third year was worse than their first two. Some  cited their fourth or fifth. Some said every year was just as bad, so I didn't know what to expect.

I reached for one of those pills when, after nearly five years of widowhood, I accepted David's invitation to go swing dancing. That's how nervous I was. Many emotions stressed me at the prospect of my first date in decades, but somehow the thought of my trying to dance after all of my danceless years trumped my other fears and inhibitions.

If our first date had been a dinner, I don't think I would have been so scared. For one thing, I would have expected to be seated throughout most of the evening,  observing as much as I was being observed. The worst that could have happened was some awkward silence or maybe spilling some wine or missing my mouth with my fork.

But all that would have been private--embarrassing, yes--but contained within our table for two. Whereas going to a dance put me in a public space. I'd have to perform. And as I've mentioned, I didn't know how to dance. I imagined all eyes on me as I stumbled and clomped. My teen-aged self cried, everyone will laugh at me!

What I didn't know then was that no one would really care. They came for their own reasons. The new dancers like me were risking their shaky self-esteem to learn a whole new way of movement. The social dancers were too focused on following or leading their partners to judge others. And the competitive dancers were into practicing their routines.

The huge dance space in the Elk's Club in Albany, NY was packed when we got there. The lesson that preceded the dance was just about to begin. The dancers made a double circle--men on the outside and women facing them on the inside. They ranged from college age to old age and everything in between. A twenty-something man in a pork pie hat began by instructing us on the proper hand clasp for swing dancing. It really was a beginner's lesson. I was introduced to slow counts and quick counts, front steps and back steps, and dancing down low.

After each set of instructions, the outer circle of women revolved to practice with a new partner. Some of the men were experienced and some not at all. Despite the ineffectualness of the long- expired pill, I began to relax. There was a spirit of camaraderie that pervaded almost everyone. A few grumpy partners didn't bother me, as I would have thought they might. I even found myself consoling a couple of apologetic men with two left feet.

I was surprised to find that my years of watching American Bandstand and practicing with my girlfriends or alone with the hallway banister had somehow made a home in my body. After all these years, what I once knew about dancing, without ever knowing I knew it, came back to life.

The Last Time I Danced

The last time I danced was in the 60s (not my 60s--the 1960s). Swing, which I grew up watching on American Bandstand, had gone out of style before I was old enough to go to dances. By that time, even the Twist had come and gone. My friends and I danced the Frug, the Swim, the Mashed Potatoes, and other writhes and twitches that a girl could do at her own pace and whim.

These developments made me happy since I'd never learned how to follow a boy's lead.  I knew the steps, but that was different from actually doing them myself or taking my cues from a partner. I tried to practice with my best friend Joan, but we both wanted to lead.

In high school my friends and I started going to college mixers. By then we were all doing our own thing to the music pounding through the houses on fraternity row. We girls would quaintly wait for a boy to ask us to dance and then, as if set free by his choice ( a kind of lead, I suppose), we would each begin to move to the beat of our own pulses. Sometimes we faced the boy and sometimes not, depending on our mood and how much we liked him.

Mostly, I remember not touching and not responding. I liked that at the time. Dancing on my own terms helped me feel powerful and independent. There was no pressure from the boy's hand on the small of my back to tell me where I should move next. There was no submitting my hand to his clasp  to determine our pace and pattern.  The boy was as apt to take the lead from me as I from him.

At weddings I watched my father lead my mother through dips and turns with a grace that seemed charming and archaic. When they danced the Fox Trot, my mother's femininity magnified ten-fold.  She was light and easy to maneuver. I watched her anticipate my father's every intention as if an invisible cord connected them.

On the rare occasions when my father took me as his partner, I was stiff and dumb. My mind could not allow such relinquishment of control, and I didn't yet understand how little the mind had to do with it. Part of me would have loved to experience such grown-up elegance, but I submerged those fleeting wishes to ally with my generation's idea of dancing. Lessons were discussed and dismissed. I was adamant.  The earlier dances were not cool. By rejecting partner dancing, I would be part of the new youth movement.