Trip report: NEFFA

[AMM]

I made it to NEFFA (New England Folk Festival Assoc. ?) this past weekend. It's a good opportunity for me to wear my more flamboyant skirts, and to look at other people's skirts, in addition to dancing and making music.

The non-skirt part:

I did some dancing -- it's the only place I get to do "International" or Balkan folk dancing, so I did a fair amount of that, plus some squares, and a little English. But I spent more time making music. There were a few scheduled "jams", which I made a point of going to, and there was one jam in a wide part of a hall which ran pretty much continuously (with a changing cast) from Friday night until Sunday night. I would drift in, play along for a while to the best of my ability, and drift off when it got too hard. I also played in the "Festival orchestra," which is to say a band composed of whoever shows up with instrument in hand. I played on Sunday for the closing contra dance. There were two hammer dulcimers and a saxophone (I think) plus a crowd of fiddles, flutes, pennywhistles, and guitars (I was one of the guitars.) Great fun, especially since there were enough people that nobody was depending upon me doing it right. However, I'd thought it was only an hour, and it turned out to be 1.5 hours. My arm was pretty sore by the end.

The skirt-related part:

There are always a fair number of skirted and kilted men at these events. Most of the skirts are tiered skirts or gauze skirts, anywhere from knee length to floor length. One rather tall balding man with a pony tail was wearing a floor-length skirt with some sort of underskirts that flipped around as he walked. The guy with the skirt made out of neckties was not in evidence, though.

Some of the women were wearing costume-like skirts or dresses (for the Civil War dance session, some of the women wore hoop skirts), and these were pretty, but for the most part, both women and men went for a casual look -- T-shirts with loose skirts, jeans, or shorts, for the most part. Other than those in costume, there were very few people who dressed to attract a second look.

I'd like to think that I fell into the category of "attracting a second look." I wore my black-over-light-blue skirt with light blue socks and skirt Friday night. Saturday I wore the rainbow skirt with red shirt and socks, and then changed into my red skirt with black shirt and socks. (Yeah, I tend to match the socks to the shirt -- my imagination doesn't yet reach to anything more daring.) On Sunday, I wore my brown skirt with yellow, and switched into a Wal-Mart long denim skirt for my stage "appearance" and for the trip home. I had a number of women (and a few men) tell me they liked my skirts, which is a nice ego boost for a 50-something guy who often feels quite over-the-hill.

Since I wore my skirts to and from the motel, I ended up having to explain my skirt-wearing to some of the folks at the motel. No one was hostile (another data point), and I generally explained it by saying I was at a dance event, and a lot of people dress up for it. That seemed to satisfy my interviewers, which confirms the value of one of my rules for explanations: avoid inflicting TMI (Too Much Information.)

Some people at the festival (always women -- interesting) asked, and to them I said, it's because it's fun, not to mention cooler. I even mentioned that I thought guys started doing it at contra dances because they were envious of all the fun the women were having with their skirts, twirling and flapping them to generate a breeze and generally using them to be more flirtatious. (Contra dancers tend to be very heavy flirters.)

One time when I was asked the question, a woman behind me piped up with "because the women go wild over them." I'll have to add this to my arsenal of standard come-backs.

I got home after about 3.5 hours on the road (mostly I-95), tired but safe.

[crfriend]

Well, that trip report can only offer one conclusion: rousing success!

For all the many things that have piqued my curiosity about AMM, the one I found that stuck out in this "trip report" is that of musicality. Why I hadn't suspected it sooner baffles me, because music --and the ability to make it -- is so fundamental a skill that given all the other talents present, music almost surely must have been amongst them.

I'd like to think that I fell into the category of "attracting a second look."

From the look of your particular aesthetic, I can certainly see that -- and that's a good thing! I definitely enjoyed, by way of Internet voyeurism, the comment of "because the women go wild over them."; that must've been particularly flattering.

Drat. Now I'm ruing my decision to stay at home like a lump instead of sallying forth unto Mansfield, MA (only about 50 miles distant) for what would likely have been both an instructive and enjoyable experience.

[JRMILLER]

Dancing is something Toni and I do too. The East coast is not that far away for us. You guys home in on another dance of interest and we may be able to drive in for it! We contra dance and ballroom dance.