I recently put a 3 minute video (4.6 Megabytes) on a dance web page, that shows my dance partner Rita Stine and myself doing a West Coast Swing demonstration dance last September at the Dupont Fire Hall (over near Wilkes-Barre, Pa).

The attached JPEG shows a screen capture of the movie's web page.

You should be able to play this video if you have Apple's Quicktime player

(get it here FREE for Windows)  installed on your computer.

It is saved in "web streaming" format, so if you have a high speed connection, it should (hopefully) begin playing almost immediately.

((I made this video using Apple's iMovie6 software on a Macintosh computer.  Similar software is available for Windows computers.  The video footage was obtained courtesy of Sounds Of Music Entertainment.))

While there's nothing particularly significant about us old folks doing a more or less beginner-level performance,  this could just as well be a video of YOU dancing . . .  or your model railroad in operation . . .  or showing you joyfully unpacking your new Macintosh or your new Dell computer.

I have been trying unsuccessfully to get the local dance instructors to put some of the summaries of their patterns on a similar web page for review.    Stop and think about it . . . how many times have you gotten home from a dance class, and you can't quite remember whether the "rock step" or the "pivot turn" is done on the 5-6 count or done on the 7-8 count.  So you end up practicing it wrong.

The instructors typically retort with, "but we don't want to 'give' our lessons away" by having them on the web.      If that was the case, we could all be dancing like experts from using mail order videos. My belief is that many of us can REVIEW a new pattern from a video, but 98% of us cannot LEARN a new pattern from a video.  We have to actually take the class and be "walked" through it step-by-step by the instructors about 10 or 20 times.

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