Needs must

In Ontario, Servant of God Catherine de Hueck Doherty (née Ekaterina Fyodorovna Kolyschkina) is a kind of local saint. The founder of Madonna House, she was an aristocrat who survived the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution by fleeing Russia. She had a long life in the USA and Canada as a champion of the poor, but today I am contemplating something she wrote about her privileged childhood. In short, her mother made her learn the tasks the servants did so that she would know how to do them just as well. This was not spooky foreknowledge but simply a lesson in household management.

I think the same principle might apply when it comes to organizing dances: it would be useful if, at any time, you could step in to do a necessary task yourself. This might (and will probably) include publicity, sales, hiring musicians and/or halls, engaging dance teachers or teaching dances yourself, creating successful playlists, composing a viable dance programme, catering, connecting the sound system, expelling curious invaders, washing the dishes, and goodness knows what else. The idea is not to do everything but to be able to do anything pertaining to your dance.

During two years of organizing dances and dance parties, I have found myself doing all kinds of things I never thought of doing before: buying a coffee-and-cake set for 40+ people, baking cakes big enough to feed them, relearning dances, teaching dances, hiring dance teachers, renting big halls, writing apologetics for Catholic dances, trying to get religion-based accommodations for Catholics at secular dances (long story), selling tickets, emailing various priests to advertise the dances, planning dance programmes, making playlists of dance music, and collecting the names of Catholic musicians happy to play for a free ticket or an honorarium or love. But until now I have avoided the absolutely unthinkable: returning to the piano.

My relationship to pianos is complicated, unlike my relationship with cars, which is simple. I can’t drive a car, but I can play the piano–I just choose not to. Although I hated almost every minute of them, I did have 9 whole years of piano lessons and was dragged, abject and weeping, from Leila Fletcher Piano Course Book 1 to Royal Conservatory of Music Grade 8 (or, translated into British, about Grade 6 of the ABRSM). Also, my brother-the-concert-level-pianist/organist provided me with a Roland 9 years ago. And so last month, when I contemplated the loss of a musician, I plugged in the piano and began work on “Fly Me To the Moon.”

The loud crunching noise is my late piano teacher (whose surname I now realize could be translated into “Of the Rough Morning”) turning in her grave. To give the old battle-axe her due, she did bang a musical education into my head and hands, even Rudiments and Theory of Music, over which I sniffled at her dining room table.

It seems to me that organizing dances is like writing a novel–eventually you start throwing in everything that comes to mind (Odin disguised as a one-eyed George V, hip-hop dancing elves, Göring’s Luftwaffe record). Or maybe it’s more like building a CO2 scrubber for Apollo 13: you see what you have on hand to salvage any situation:

We have no dance teacher this month. Can I learn these steps well enough to teach them? Can someone help me?

The parish hall has grown too small for us. What is the nearest hall available, and how much will it cost?

A tree has fallen on the tracks, trapping the ceilidh band between Dundee and Kirkcaldy. What music do I have on my phone?

Our jazz pianist won’t always be available. How long will it take me to become Nina Simone?

Needless to say, you will learn as you go along what you need to do (and preferably not do) to have an ever more successful event. Happily, I have kept a diary of all my dance parties and ticketed dances, and it is full of checklists, phone numbers, guest lists, man:woman ratio records, dance terminology, and “Lessons Learned.” The No. 1 Lesson Learned for Michaelmas 2024 was “Don’t thread [the pencils through] the dance cards at home. The devil will tangle them.”

Crucially, I also write “Positive Dance Memories.” I see that one of September’s was “Discovering the light switch for the stage before surprised gaze of [hall’s manager]. Good prep on my part; I had checked out the stage’s sockets, etc., months before.”

Of course, you cannot do everything yourself. As I have mentioned before, I prefer not to have any task after arriving at the venue on the Night of the Big Dance beyond welcoming people, explaining the dance cards, anticipating the guests’ needs (e.g. coffee), introducing the band, thanking everyone, and saying goodbye to the guests at the door. And this means recruiting volunteers (or “volunteers”) beforehand to bring the supplies, play the music, call the dances, serve the refreshments, forbid admittance to inebriates, wash the dishes, repack the boxes and drive the remainder of the supplies back to the McLean residence. Naturally, all the gentlemen in the room have to ask all the ladies in the room to dance. The dance cards assist in this task, as do my little speeches about Edinburgh hospitality, but ultimately, every man in the room over the age of 12 has to take an active role because–tradition.

And this brings me to a very important point, my fellow church ladies, my sister Susans of the Parish Council Black Mantilla: you cannot organize this dance for you. You must organize this dance for your community, and if your community is happy and excited about it, it will be worth all your efforts (and, very likely, expenses). If, however, your community thinks it all a bit of a drag, it absolutely won’t. In that case, transfer your enviable energy and laudable desire to serve to some other project. You could organize a parish cake contest, charge an admission fee, make a video of the judging, and send the proceeds of the afternoon to an iron-clad orthodox Catholic charity.

Another important point is that not everyone will want to come to your dance, and it is not impossible that someone will try to dissuade others from going.

Although in Scotland we think of dancing as traditional, denunciation of dancing is also traditional. For example, there was a huge fuss in Edinburgh in the early 18th century when society ladies began to organize subscription dances. The first ones were held in a building near the Grassmarket, and apparently a Calvinist mob once attacked the wooden doors of the improvised dance hall with flaming hot pokers. Meanwhile, the secret to why dances were so little mentioned by Lucy Maud Montgomery until Rilla of Ingleside (1921) may lie in the fact that she was the (very unhappy) wife of a Scots-Canadian Presbyterian minister: in Rilla we discover that the grown-up children of the local fictional Presbyterian minister aren’t allowed to dance. And even George MacDonald Fraser suggests in “The General Danced at Dawn” that there is a battle raging in the Scottish soul between Calvinism and the native love of dancing.

Of course, Scotland is not alone in this war. Some Christians have always danced, and occasionally other Christians have told them not to, and most Christians have ignored those Christians. The Catholic parish halls of Ireland were packed with dancers from 1900 to 1960 and beyond, even though individual priests and bishops didn’t like dancing in general, or late nights, or jazz, or boys seeing girls home, or what have you. The only difference between then and now is laypeople eager to forbid what their pastors allow.

Naturally you will feel aggrieved if, after all your work and worry, people badmouth your project. My advice is to ignore them and concentrate on your guest list. Make sure you write down the names of everyone who buys a ticket and do your best to memorize them. Perhaps you could even make it a habit to pray for them. These are your guests, and they, your musicians, other volunteers, and the owners of the hall are the only people who count when it comes to this dance. (Well, spare a thought for the people who have to live with you, too.)