Ohle's Pond Bees' Nest

 

Late Summer Beauty

 

Remembering Fred Park

Fred Park--dance caller, musician, raconteur, MC, photographer, ink maker, and river enthusiast--exited stage left on July 31, not so long after discovering that he had stage IV lung cancer. 

 His daughters Suzannah and Georgia Rose along with many friends staged a memorial concert followed by a dance at Warren Wilson College on August 19. It was a lively event filled with songs and stories: a perfect tribute. They streamed the concert on YouTube and you can watch it here.  

During the past 10 or 12 years, after he moved to Celo, Fred was the most frequent caller at the dances at Arthur Morgan School. He was a great teacher of dancing, his timing as a caller was impeccable, he had a voice that could cut through a wall of noise, he knew hundreds of dances, and his love for community dancing was unsurpassed. 

Rather than pick dances based on the abilities of the least experienced dancers in a crowd, he preferred to challenge people a little even if that made the teaching take longer. He was comfortable calling to a room of 100, and he was just as present and enthusiastic when there were six or eight. 

Back in 2010, I made a little video late into a dance evening at AMS. The crowd had thinned out, Fred wanted to try a dance form called a "triple," and he had to join the dancers to make the numbers work out. It was tricky, and he had to do a lot of correcting while he was dancing. But everyone stuck with it, and at 40 seconds you can see what happened. (A few months ago, Fred dropped into the comments and wrote out the calls for the dance.)

We're going to miss that guy.

Sunfall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miika found the sunfall!