Generally, when people think about the dances of the Jazz Age (the 1920s & 30s), they bring to mind exuberant youth dances like the Charleston or Jitterbug, or the theatrical dances of Fred and Ginger.

What Fred & Ginger did was, of course, never intended to be an accurate representation of how ordinary folks danced. Plenty of examples of normal, workaday ballroom dancing can be seen in movies of the period but not being done by featured performers like Fred and Ginger. If you want to see how it was really done, look at the folks in the background.

Fred and Ginger have, however, been extremely influential in shaping modern competition ballroom styles, and those have had a major impact on what is currently taught by dance instructors.

This is a 5 minute video of the November 26th Social Daunce Irregulars Victorian Grand Ball. Purists beware. The last dance is not any dance in particular, but a pastiche of three different set dances, done to a completely unrelated piece of music.

Video taken at the Queen Mary Art Deco Weekend tea dance, put on by the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles.

Music by Ian Whitcomb and the Bungalow Boys, with vocals by Alex Mendham.

I have provided A/V support to a wide variety of programs and have done countless of my own simple and complex presentations over the years and I think it might be useful to set down in writing some of the issues that come up time after time. Perhaps, if I document them, people might be less likely to repeat the errors of the past.

I will focus here on technical issues. Stylistic issues like not burying your head in your notes and reading in a monotone or in that odd, artificial sing-song style many people take on when presenting; or not filling your slides with text; or not reading your slides verbatim; I will leave to another time.

On Sunday, May 29th 2011, we will premiere what I hope will be the first of many "Lanterman Summer Whites Picnic and Ukulele Rendezvous" annual events.

This event is a bit of a departure for me. My previous productions have been characterized by structure, scheduling and organization. A certain amount of latitude was provided for creative people to be creative, but we always knew whose job it was to do what, when. That is not the case here. This event is deliberately unstructured, and is intended to be more like a party - where the guests are not passive observers but ARE the show.

This is a very nice compilation from the end of the Victorian period, which provides some choreographies for many of the most popular figure dances.

Attached are my PowerPoint slides for the presentation I gave on the basics of Drupal at the Computers in Libraries conference on March 22nd 2011 in Washington DC.

To benefit the "Lanterman Music Fund" which supports the preservation of the Lanterman House music archive and the performance of live music at the Lanterman historic house in La Canada/Fintridge, I will be offering "Phony Daguerreotypes", for a tax deductible donation of $10, to those who attend the Lanterman Ragtime Tea Dance and selected future events at Lanterman House.