This frees me up to talk about the Harlem Hot Shots' huge week. Last weekend they performed in the show “The Last Bounce” which is supposed to be the last show featuring the Stockholm based dance company Bounce. As you’ll see from the video, it was a huge arena sized show in front of thousands of people. According to the website they did five shows in front of a total of 54,000 people!
The week of the event, I pretty much hit the ground running when I got in on Wednesday. I arrived in NYC by bus a little after 1 pm, checked into my hotel and then got a text that some people were starting a meeting at 2 pm in the Manhattan Center. It was off to the races.
It kept going that day until about 3 am. I should have taken a cue from Chester Whitmore who I caught napping during our first and last all hands staff meeting that night. I was impressed by his ability to doze off, be awakened by a question directed at him, and then promptly fall back asleep when attention went on to something that didn't concern him. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that luxury because everything concerned me.
In 1965, long before coming to Capitol Hill, future Congressman John Lewis led 600 people on a march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama to question Governor George C. Wallace's role in subverting black voting rights in his state. Wallace is the same man who less than a year before famously declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Having already been beaten several times from participating in the Freedom Rides and numerous other marches throughout the South, Lewis crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge into a wall of state troopers. So bent on conflict, those officers had already donned their gas masks and had their billy clubs at the ready. They had every intention of kicking Lewis’s ass. Not only did he and the marchers keep going forward to meet them, but they did so with no intention of fighting back.
Congressman Lewis still bears scars from that day now remembered as Bloody Sunday.
I actually started writing notes after the first time I went up to New York City for meetings, but then Frankie passed away. The possibility of something happening before the event was always in the back of our minds. During our April 20th meeting in NYC, Frankie had been admitted into the hospital. At one point I caught myself considering various contingencies, but stopped. The idea just seemed too overwhelming not to mention too morbid to consider at the time.
And then it happened. A lot of people seemed to be surprised by his death, but for me it happened in slow motion as I got constant updates both public and private until the end. That weekend I wasn’t the biggest fan of the internet because it gave me a more intimate portrait of death than I ever wanted. I won’t go into that much further. We all had our reactions to it, and I’d rather keep mine to myself.
You can’t control Falling in Love. That’s where the Falling part comes in, and why everything that comes after that can be so beautiful or so tragic. Sometimes both and maybe even at the same time. Falling is uncontrollable. If it could be controlled, then it would be Flying. Flying is how some of the old timers describe the way Frankie Manning danced. Flying is also what superheroes do. Frankie probably would have laughed off that comparison, but it’s a better description than you would think. After all, heroes give us Hope.
Hope is about possibilities and opportunities. There are now thousands of people around the world that can express themselves in a way that should have disappeared decades ago because Frankie taught them to Swing.
Swing is the way your Soul expresses itself. It's not just about music or movements. Swing about creating something new or different out of something familiar. Frankie once bragged that he could Swing even when he was standing still.
But when we Swing too hard or Hope for too much, sometimes we Fall. It felt like that a year ago. But that was Frankie’s final lesson to us: that Falling isn't always a bad thing. A year ago, something tragic eventually turned into something very beautiful.
Flying is not the opposite of Falling. It’s just another way of doing it differently.
This is the second installment of a special feature that I’m doing with Ramona Staffeld. We’re looking at some very old school clips of her past performances and getting her reactions. The first one was from the 1998 American Lindy Hop Championships. This one is Ramona dancing with Frankie Manning at Midsummer's Night Swing at Lincoln Center. Everything after the video below is written by her with a few hopefully helpful edits from me. Enjoy!
I am in the process of re-posting a series of notes I originally put up on Facebook recapping my involvement with Frankie Manning's 95th Birthday Festival. I wasn't planning posting the following note, but as I was preparing this series, I noticed that there's some interesting background bits that I thought may be useful to know to give what comes later a little more context.
What do you call a one man flash mob? Canadian. Relax. It's the weekend.
Bonus: Check out this sweet routine from an event called Shuffle The House from a few weeks ago in, I think, Switzerland.
Bonus 2: A nice two woman Charleston routine from Portugal by Diana Rocha and Abeth Farag. According to an earlier version of this routine, it was partially choreographed by Nina Gilkenson.
April is getting pretty crazy with all the cool videos coming out. I've posted quite a bunch of videos from far off lands, but I wanted to spotlight a few American ones that have come out in the past few weeks. They all happen to be college teams, and are a nice look at the next generation of Lindy Hop.
North Side of the US Capitol in Russell Senate Park this afternoon by the reflecting pool at the end of North Capitol Street. She's in a strapless wedding dress with a long flowing train that she's holding bunched up in her hands so it doesn't touch the ground. She's flanked by three of her girlfriends casually dressed in shirts and jeans. One of them falls behind as she checks her camera.
He's in a tuxedo. White tie and white vest. He jogs up ahead of the group a few steps, jumps up onto and richochets off of a park bench into a heel click. He tries to keep walking like nothing happened, but looks and smiles back at the soon to be bride.
The friend with the camera runs to catch up with the rest of the group as she figures something out and yells something in Korean.
