...reminds me of Morris sides...

Neat, BP! When I get home, I'll check that out.

Wow, chuckdarwin, Morris sides...now, there's another FPP in the making.

Ever hear -- I can't remember if it's Stan Rogers or Garnet Rogers - do his riff on Morris dancing? It's pretty hilarious - he just describes it for the audience, men prancing with hankies and sticks. A couple of family friends, folkies, heard the Rogers bit but had never seen Morris. They asked me for some independent confirmation that the hankies and sticks are indeed an accurate depiction...and yeah, they certainly are. There is a little Morris hotbed in Southeastern Connecticut, and they used to dance at a lot of events there.

The first time I saw it was rather hallucinatory. I was in college, and had stayed up through the night with a friend who was chemically enhanced. I was just tired. We were wandering around campus at dawn when we heard bells like reindeer bells - came around the corner of the student center, and saw a group of women, long green skirts and big flower hoops, doing garland dancing to an accordian and drum. They were the women's version of Morris.

Years later, the men's group of the same town started doing kind of a neat thing where they climbed a nearby mountain just before sunrise on MayDay and danced up the sun. I never went, because that is too early for me, but always thought it was a nice idea.