We've been back from DC for most of a week and I'm still just finding
my feet, but here are a few brief observations anyway.
My talk at the Library of Congress before the convention went very
well, despite the fact that they moved it to a different room at
the last minute and put the sign announcing the change outside the
new room, and there was another event with free food at the
same time which took away many of the people who might otherwise
have attended. We wound up with about 20 people all told, most of
them square dancers who were also in DC for the convention.
Although I felt incredibly underprepared, that thing in my head
that takes over when I have to do public speaking did its job and
the presentation came off smashingly. Some of the square dancing
librarians in attendance were so excited they were talking about
inviting me to speak at an ALA conference. I'd love to, and I hope
it really happens. I'm also going to try to sell the talk as a
non-fiction article.
I'd originally planned to speak without visual aids, but at the
last minute I was inspired by a
talk
at TED.com and decided to put together a PowerPoint slide show
consisting only of images. It worked great, even though I had to
clutch the projector cable in my hand all through the talk to keep
the image from turning magenta. I also used PowerPoint to record
the talk, but unfortunately it only recorded the first 10-20 seconds
of audio per slide. Which is a real shame, because the bits that
did get recorded sound fabulous.
The convention itself was superbly run and featured a lot of great
dancing, including several unusual specialty tips: the Cipher tip with
calls delivered as spoonerisms or riddles, a Mirror tip that swapped
left for right (if your square breaks down during a Mirror tip, is that
seven years bad luck?), and an hour of six-couple "rectangle dancing."
Allowing people to choose their table mates for the banquet, then
placing the tables at random, was an excellent innovation. The one
negative comment I have was that the Fun Badge Tour buses were
given insufficient directions, which (together with a mechanical
breakdown) caused us to miss an entire stop on the tour and wound up
with our bus being so late for the last stop we had to dance it by
ourselves. We had fun anyway.
We also visited the Newseum (highly recommended), the Spy Museum (only
okay, especially because it was so crowded that day) and the Smithsonian Natural
History museum (I saw so many skeletons there that for a few hours thereafter
all the people looked like skeletons with skin and bones on) and ate
many fabulous meals. The convention was right at the Woodley
Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan subway stop (and why are the first two separated
by a hyphen, but the last two by a slash?) and there were dozens of
great ethnic restaurants within one block. Probably the best meal was
the Afghan dinner we had on the first night with
bibliocub,
bjarvis, and
sfleatherbear, but none of them
was less than good.