BOW Action

So my brain has finally recovered from this past weekend. The "BOW" in "BOW Action" stands for BC, Oregon, Washington, as those are the three areas the dancers are from. I don't know what the "Action" part stands for. The caller was Vic Ceder from Los Olivos, California. The schedule was as follows:

Friday, C3B, 8:30 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.

Saturday, C2, 10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Saturday, C2, 2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Saturday, C1, 7:30 p.m. - 10:00 p.m

Sunday, C3A, 9:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Sunday, C3A, 1:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

So I attended the last 5 as I don't dance C3B. I wasn't particularly concerned with the C2, and certainly I figured that the C1 would be a welcome break - the calm before the storm of the Sunday sessions. There were 8 tips per session. It turned out that my brain didn't dissolve until the 6th tip of the last session where quite literally I could not differentiate the calls from the music. I was quite dejected as I sat out the 7th tip and was very apprehensive squaring up for the last tip. Perhaps the 6th tip was just a fluke, perhaps it was because we had some weaker dancers in the square, perhaps I needed the break during the 7th tip, perhaps he changed the difficulty of his choreo, perhaps, perhaps, whatever. It turned out that I danced the last tip quite well.

The weekend left me jazzed enough to boot up CSDS (Vic's square dance callers' software) and write some C1 and C3A choreo, as well as tidy up my C1 choreo database. I also reviewed how to get the program to spit out a frequency count of calls at level in a given database, so I can now fill in the gaps by writing choreo with the calls that haven't been used much or at all. I really want to find out more about how CSDS works so I can make better use of features which interest me, such as having it search the databases for certain calls while I'm calling a dance, so I can theme my tips.

Thank goodness that Len is a friend of Vic's. I had e-mailed Vic a few years ago to ask a question about the software and got a rather terse response. Since then, I've been reluctant to ask anything directly; rather, I have asked Len who would then ask Vic. Perhaps after this past weekend when I actually got to say more than "hello" to the man (indeed, even that is more than I usually speak to him), I will feel more comfortable asking him about the software. In fact, in the process of going through my old choreo, I found something a sequence that the program no longer wanted to understand. I wrote to Vic asking about it and am looking forward to hearing from him when he has time.