Recent content by JudeMorrigan

At least within the context of ballroom socials in the US, I don't think that's really a problem. (Crowded nightclub floors may be another story.) I remember standing next to an instructor at a Nashville social while she and I looked out over the floor with some bemusement. She and I were...

Count me in as a guy who's very, very blind without vision correction ("Is it cheating if I say I know the top letter is an "E" even though I can't actually see it") who buy contacts every couple of years purely for the purpose of competing. In fact, I've been giving serious consideration to...

Having just got back from this year's, I thought maybe this thread could use a bump. While my circumstances going in were a bit different, my report has a lot of similarities to Dancey's. Anyways, while I do have access to some excellent instructors as I live ~2hrs south of David Hamilton's...

Vol State runs a pro-am showdance scholarship, which is nice.

For what it's worth, I talked with my pro about doing Southeastern when USA Dance was first spinning up their pro-am as I was doing pro-am at the time and am an Alabamian myself. She was totally willing and has, in fact, brought students there the last couple of years. But for me, it turned...

In fairness, that's heavily age-level dependent. I mean, it is for both genders, but if he's an A - he's only seeing semis worth of gents in age-combined events. Even as a B, I don't think I ever had more than two other guys in an event with age restrictions. I did have the occasional semi in...

When I was looking up the results of some friends, I was kind of shocked at just how much smaller the adult international syllabus fields were than when I competed in them a few years back. I'm curious, I know events are down all-around, but were there college teams that stopped attending...

Back in 2008, I was one of the suckers who bought a home using an 80/20 loan. I've since been able to refinance the primary mortgage at a very nice rate (with reduced years), but the second mortgage has been hanging around my neck like an albatross this whole time. It is now paid. In full...

Notionally, I was always fine with the idea of not dancing a bunch of events. After all, I started in am-am and that's how things work there. My pro always encouraged me to dance as much as possible. Which I get - as seldom as I danced, time in front of the judges and experience on the...

For me, there was *some* variation between local and travelling comps, but not a lot. Locals would typically be 4-8 freestyles, one championship and one scholarship. I'd sometimes do two scholarships instead of the championship (dancing down an age category for the second) where that was...

You're 100% right, but it does happen. My old am instructor did 10-dance and I used to get outraged on his behalf all the time. "But four of the five 10 dance couples had fewer than four marks per dance in the standard semis. The differences don't actually *mean* anything, that's basically...

Point of order: while I'm not going to pretend that there are *no* pros out there who only teach their students to be able to dance with them, it is very definitely not a universal truth. To the OP, while I agree with others that a stint in pro-am shouldn't really be necessary, if you want to...

Unless they're a bad partner, in which case you should just make sure it's heavily stoned. :p

Any chance of a 2018 update on this? I'm going to be travelling to SF at the end of June, and was thinking I might try to shake myself out of my dance funk by hitting up an area social. I'd *love* to be able to make it down to Starlite, but I'm staying in Union Square and the travel time seems...

Ruminations from a guy: Every now and then, one of the topics that comes up on this forum is who defines just how close a couple should be when in closed hold. The standard answer is that that lady decides, but while that's not *wrong*, I've always considered it a bit of an oversimplication...