Photos from Saturday’s dance are hot off the press! What a night! Over 230 people were at the dance! If we keep getting attendance like that, I’ll need to look into a super wide angle lens just to get photos!

Lots more events like this are coming up. Read some of the previous blog posts for a sneak peak of what is on the horizon.

Saturday, April 14th: Come out and join special guest DJ Steve from Tampa Bay as he spins the vintage vinyl and gets you movin’ on the hard wood floor to the best in danceable 50’s music. From rock-n-roll to early R&B… from slow tempos to fast… it will be a flashback to the class dance of 1959! The beginning dance lesson is from 8-9pm and dancing is from 9 to midnight. Admission is only $6. Click here for more info.

This Memorial Day Weekend (May 26-27), we will continue the tradition we started last year with the Tampa/Orlando City Exchange. On Saturday night, Tampa comes to Orlando to dance… and on Sunday night, Orlando heads to Tampa to dance (remember, no work on Monday)! Once again, “Vintage USO” is the theme of the weekend and there will be prizes for dressing vintage. To build on last year, this year’s Saturday night dance will feature live music by “Kid Dutch and his Blusicians”! We’ll have more details available soon, so be sure to check back.

Back before Dawn and I started Flyin’ Footwork, we worked with a group called WBC. This was the group that originally started both the swing dances at UCF and Whirl & Twirl.  Natch (a co-member of WBC) recently dug up some interesting trivia in the old records. For years, Dawn and I have had trouble jogging our memories to remember the exact date of the first swing dance at Whirl & Twirl.  Well, now we know. The records show the date was 3/2/02 and 35 people were in attendance. With the last dance having over 170 people out, I would say Orlando has come a long way! Notice the date is off the normal schedule. I think it took us a time or two to settle into 2nd Saturdays. With a little more digging, we found that the Friday night dances at UCF were started on 2/23/01. On that night, 37 people were present.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane Natch! This is great to add to the local dance history!

Singer and star of Hollywood musicals, Betty Hutton, died today at the age of 86. (News Article) For those of you who were out Saturday, I played her version of “Stuff Like That There” (by request from Adam). If you have been dancing a while, you have probably also heard her songs on a number of occasions. Titles like “Murder, He Says”, “Orange Colored Sky”, “Doctor, Lawyer Indian Chief”, and “It’s Oh So Quiet” are all played from time to time. She will be remembered for her distinctive voice with tons of energy!

As one of life’s odd little coincidences, there were a total of three couples at Saturday’s dance with the name “Rob & Dawn”. Neat!

The photos from the March 10th dance are now online. A big thanks to everyone who came out! What we thought was going to be a slower DJ night before the live band night at the end of the month ended up being huge! I’m sure it set some kind of record for a non-band night in the spring season… and the energy was great! Hope to see everyone back on March 24th for “Swing in Time”!

Well, what started out to be a new graphic design for our Lindy Hop Class has generated a lot of buzz. Dawn and I have gotten a lot of positive feedback on the iLindy design that has appeared on our flyers and web site. On Friday night, we wore t-shirts to the UCF dance with the original test design I created and we got a ton of people asking us where we got them. So here they are! Both the original design and the quickstop “do you?” version.

• iLindy Original Design
• iLindy – Do You?

The shirts are online order only. As you can see there are lots of variety in colors and styles. Enjoy! …and thanks for the great feedback on the designs!