As you’ll often hear from our community, Frankie Manning was one of the founding fathers of the Lindy Hop….he definitely inspired many of us. Sadly he passed away a few weeks before his 95th Birthday…which was about 3 years ago. Anyhow, we want to keep his spirit alive by letting people know how awesome he was…So we offer you some history lessons with a series of videos that we found. The first, is Frankie retelling his story about the first aerial…(there are many video interviews with Frankie, we hope you explore them and get to know Frankie & his dancing).

The second is from a documentary on the Savoy Ballroom, which is part of a series, there are more on YouTube if you want to explore more…(this one has a brief interview with Frankie).

This is the amazing choreography from Hellzapoppin that shows Frankie & Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers at their peak, tearing it up…Frankie can be seen at about 1:15 in overalls and he’s the guy getting kicked in the butt…always a comic, Frankie used to tell the story of how his butt hurt for a few days after they did so many rehearsals of this high energy routine…

And sort of related, we have some really interesting and primitive footage from a Savoy Ballroom pavillion/exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair which was held in New York. The footage was shot using a home movie camera of the time and unfortunately, they didn’t have sound. It’s still fascinating to watch. There are many social dancers and as is still common with a lot of dances there are more women than men, so there are a lot of gals dancing with gals…(and this is before a lot of the guys shipped out for WWII).

Flash mobs are everywhere, and Lindy Hop, swing dancing and the Shim Sham have gotten in on the craze…these videos show you just how International the dance is and how you can have a complex flash mob, a less formal flash mob using the instant choreography of the Shim Sham (our Lindy Hop national anthem dance), or have a simple routine (check out the Boston Lindy Bomb Squad below). The point is to get out there and expose new people to the dance…and judging from the number of hits on this Denver Lindy Hop Flash Mob at the Denver Airport, a great many people have seen this, so it looks like it was pretty successful…

The Lindy Bomb Squad detonate Red Line passengers with their swingouts…!

Some dancers from San Francisco made this with a few special cameos. Pardon the French, but this is really funny and so true…these are mostly things we’ve either heard or said while dancing…some are, of course, exaggerated, this we call “comedy”.

Wow, what can we say, it was Kind of a Big Deal, and it’s taken us a week to recover! But thank you to all who participated near and far. For those who don’t know what this weekend was, it was a crazy complicated event to run!

First we had three nights of Gordon Webster and his spectacular band! Including a rehearsal night with a Question & Answer session. We had band rehearsals where we needed to open up the Whistle Stop so the band could get in. We had a 7 ft, Steinway B, grand piano we had delivered which needed to be tuned, so more trips to the Whistle Stop…all because we wanted everything to be perfect for for our first live recording at Boston Swing Central. There were band members flying in, some coming in by train. There was a lot to do behind the scenes. There were hotels to arrange, all kinds of things to take care of.

And we had a Kickstarter Campaign which we ran to also help raise funds, we blew threw our expected budget of $18,000 for the project. Gordon had some additional travelling musicians he wanted on the project and we also had more gear we needed to rent than previously thought. Overall this project is on track for about $22,000 right now, still estimated as there is still a lot to get done, but you get the idea! It is expensive. So, BSC ended up giving Gordon all of our proceeds from the weekend dances towards this project as well as he really needed our help to get this album done. We’ll have more here as we make progress. We thank everyone for their support.

Alongside the Gordon Webster recording we also had Andy & Nina doing a workshop. Their classes got us to think about our dancing in ways we don’t normally think and on top of that, they were a lot of fun. We hope you got to attend some of them, the wait list was ridiculously long and we apologize, the Whistle Stop is limited in capacity and we wanted it to remain a good experience with a relatively small class size. We could’ve rented a larger venue, but it would’ve been in a gymnasium or something and would’ve added to the costs and convenience of the weekend. We’re sorry if people were frozen out, we might try to do somethings different next year, we’ll have to see what transpires, but Andy & Nina will most likely be back in 2014!

We also declared that a few dancers are Kind of a Big Deal! And they were! Our first Jack & Jill competitions run by head judge, Gina Helfrich. That was a lot of fun and I think Traffic Cop, Jen Stout and the Librarian, Alain Fragman were declared by us to be Kind of a Big Deal in the Advanced J&J. And to Walter at Tino’s aka Diana Shiroma and her randomly selected partner Eddie Li (who competed as Stage Manager). These two we declared Kind of a Big Deal for the Open J&J! Congrats to all the other participants and winners…in our hearts, you’re all Kind of a Big Deal!