A big thank you to all of you who came out to the Halloween dance and made it such a great night! There were a ton of great costumes! The photos from the night are now online in the gallery.

Congratulations to the winners of the costume contest:

1st Place: Peter Pan and Crew
2nd Place: Gomez and Morticia Adams
3rd Place: Mario and Princess Peach

Also, special thanks go out to the Orlando City Dippers for their great team performance!

Update: More photos are available on Dave Welch’s Flickr gallery.

Can you believe that it’s already that time of year? As the season starts, we thought we would remind you of our schedule. 2nd and 4th Saturday dances continue on their regular schedule for November. Yes, that means there will be a dance on Thanksgiving weekend! We usually see lots of guests from out of town that weekend, so it’s a great time to dance! The 2nd Saturday in December is our annual Christmas swing dance. It’s one of our favorite dances to host and it wraps up our 2007 dance schedule. There isn’t a 4th Saturday dance in December since we’ll be spending time with family and the venue will be doing yearly maintenance. Dances resume their normal schedule on January 12th and we’ll be kicking off 2008 with live music by Kid Dutch!

It’s the people that really make a swing scene and this is certainly true in Jacksonville. Dawn and I had a blast dancing and teaching up there this weekend! You couldn’t ask for a more welcoming, fun, energetic and enthusiastic group of dancers! Here is a group photo we snapped of some of the crowd at the end of the night Saturday…

Thanks for everything… you guys rock!

On a side note, in the summer of 2000, a small group of Orlando swing dancers (including Dawn and I) used to make frequent trips up to Bolero’s in Jacksonville. After the workshop on Saturday, Sean (top row, far right) remembered that he still has photos on his website of us dancing up there. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

The last surviving member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, Joey Bishop, died today (10/18/07) at age 89 (news link).

Joey, a veteran of vaudeville, burlesque and nightclubs, is most remembered for his comedic one liners in the famous Rat Pack comedy and music numbers at the Sands Hotel. He is also well known from appearing in such moves as “Sergeants 3″ and the original “Ocean’s Eleven”.

“When Sinatra almost drowned filming a movie scene in Hawaii, Bishop wired him: ‘I thought you could walk on water.’”

“The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.” - Joey Bishop

Need some help coming up with an original idea for the Halloween dance costume contest? Check out the “Ten Epic Halloween Costumes” article from Mental Floss. Sure, they may not be very danceable, but they sure would rank high in originality!

Also, be sure to check out the photos of last year’s Halloween dance.

We’ve had so many people asking about the vacation photos that we’ve put the first batch online (via Flickr) for you to view. Keep in mind that there is more to come. Dawn’s photos and the Ireland photos will be online soon. If you have a Flickr account, please feel free to comment and fav.

Once we get the vacation photos online, I’m going to work on getting the photos of some of our other trips from the last year online… including… and finally… the rest of last year’s Yellowstone photos.

We’re back  in town from our travels. We’re still catching up on emails, phone calls… and sleep. We’ll be available again for private lessons and classes starting next week.

Photo by J Metz