Trip report: NOMAD Festival

[AMM]

Another trip report:

This weekend, I was at the NOMAD (Northeast Music and Dance) Festival, in New Haven, Connecticutt (USA.) I wore skirts the whole time, including going to and from the festival, and checking in and out of the motel and enjoying the "free" breakfast there. No comments at all except at the festival.

I brought 4 skirts to the festival (all in my usual full dancing skirt design), two 30" skirts (1 blue and one "rainbow") and two 25" ones (1 red, 1 brown.) I would go to the festival site each day in a 30" skirt, as I was usually a bit cold and so were the rooms. Once I got warmed up, sometime in the afternoon, I would change shirts and change into a shorter skirt. I wore my 33" Lane Bryant denim skirt on the drive home.

At the last dance session, someone was taking photographs, and I got the distinct impression she was trying to catch a shot of me with my skirts flying up to show off the slips underneath. I guess I found it a bit irritating: it's one thing for your fellow dancers to catch a glimpse, kept only in people's memory. It's another to have someone make a permanent record of it, to be gawked at by who-knows-who, like a two-headed chicken.

Anyway, as I said, I had only one experience of a comment with less than unqualified approval for my skirts: two ladies with Scottish-sounding accents and dressed in matching, arguably Scottish dresses said, well, if you can wear a skirt, you'd look even better in a kilt. I then told them of my discomforts with my kilts, and the admitted that it is indeed important for one's kilt to be comfortable. Everyone else was complimentary. Some ladies told me they were envious. (I didn't gallantly offer to trade skirts with them, though.)

There were about 4 or 5 other guys in skirts there. I'm not sure why there are fewer these days -- maybe the "Paranoia strikes deep" verse applies here. I know I anticipate negative reactions from people, and as time goes on, I have less energy to fight the fear.

[Skirt Chaser]

Even four or five other men in skirts sounds pretty neat. I've meant to ask before when and how men started dancing skirted in American culture. The cafe is the first I'd heard about it. The why is understandable- skirts look so good picking up motion but it still is rare for men to realize they can be skirted too. It is heartening to know dancing is another inroad to public skirting just as renaissance festivals seem to be.

QM

Edited to add: Aha! Just found more info in this more recent post- http://www.skirtcafe.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9840 Serves me right for reading from the bottom of the threads up.