Pride Report
Well, another Pride Festival has come and gone, and this one was different from any I’ve been a part of before. You see, back in April, I unexpectedly became the President of the Board of Directors of Foggy City Dancers, Inc., one of seven Gay square dance clubs in the SF Bay Area, and faced with declining membership and participation in what was once a thriving local arts community, I decided that we had to go big or go home.
So, I enlisted the support of the rest of the Board of Directors and we came up with a plan and budget for this year to boost our recruiting and marketing and member retention efforts. We danced on the Good Vibrations float to an all-female bluegrass band, the Dosey Dildos, and we put together a booth for all seven clubs at the Pride festival. We have other plans for the rest of the summer to attract more attention and participation as well.
Steve Huggins, the FCD Secretary, John Grima, our FCD Treasurer, and I have been brainstorming ideas for more participation. All this past week we had been shopping for our decoration supplies, creating our marketing materials, picking up our new t-shirt, and many other things to get ready for the weekend.
Saturday morning came, clear and bright and warm, and we got the booth set up and decorated, and when the first volunteers arrived, put them to work, passing out flyers and taking contact information for people. The bubble machine was sending out bubbles, the laptop was looping dancing videos, and I was using my “opera voice” to be the booth’s barker and Master of Ceremonies. Our club caller, Harlan Kerr, showed up in the afternoon and we did a little impromtu dancing next to our booth. We collected a bunch of information from folks on Saturday, and at the end of the day, I had a great conversation with Burnie from QueerBallroom, who had a dance floor set up next to us. I arranged to have us have a spot in their demonstration schedule for a quick square dance demonstration. Steve and I broke down the booth, went and had dinner, headed up to the Western Star Dancers’ “Pride and Hope” dance, where I made a big announcement about the opportunity to demonstrate on Sunday, and came home and crashed out. One day done, and one to go.
Sunday morning and Steve picked me up and we unloaded the truck at the booth, but as he was dancing on the float, I set up the booth mostly by myself, and got things ready to go. As I knew that we were going to be having a lot more people streaming by, and competing with more sound and sights, I decided to use one of our club’s amplified phonograph PAs (square dance records are still distributed on 45s, as well as digitally now) to amplify my voice to be heard over the crowd, but still with my carnival barker inflection.
We had many more people hanging out at the booth on Sunday. But one of the things that I noticed is that many of the volunteers didn’t seem terribly inclined to engage with the crowd. This is a key reason why we are having a decline in membership, I think. We collected fewer names on Sunday than Saturday, but still got a respectable amount.
Our float won the Most Outrageous Float award in the parade to wild cheering at the judges’ booth! It was so exciting!
Our parade dancers and banner carriers arrived at the booth and were heartily cheered and greeted. We had about an hour to get our dancers rested and in place for our 14:15 demonstration.
Image by John Kenny
After the dancing demonstration, it was pretty much cake for the rest of the day: more name collecting, socializing with dancers and other friends who came by to visit our booth, and then since we had more volunteers and folks hanging out, breaking down the booth was much easier.
After the booth was pretty much packed up and stuff, Frank-baby came by with our mutual buddy, Jason, and asked me if I could help Jason out a bit with his sore back. Frank took this series of photos of me stretching Jason’s back with a spinal extension lift and an assisted child’s pose stretch. Finally, I did some stretching myself to help work out the long day of being in the sun.
It was a great Pride this year. Happy Pride!
