and things are winding right down.  hmm, a nice cold glass of white wine would be perfect right now.  since we don’t have any, i guess i’ll have to settle for a diet rasberry drink.  not quite the same…

so, the civil war ball on saturday night – we had already driven to jacksonville saturday afternoon, then we drove home so i could gather together my dress and so amy could fix my hair.  she created a fabulous and beautiful up-do.

i borrowed the dress from my friend pam brown.  she had bought the dress and HADN’T EVEN WORN IT YET.  so how nice is that, letting me borrow a never-worn dress??!!  really really nice.  she suggested that i buy a headband and some flowers and create my own flower headpiece, and i thought that was a great idea.

i bought roses.  big roses.  and i put them on a headband and it looked…well, see for yourself.

yes, RIDICULOUS.  very very funny.  when i finished it i had to laugh, and i wore it over to show amy and she also laughed and then we were talking about other things and she said “i can’t take you seriously when you’re wearing that thing on your head.”

maybe it can be the start of a fabulous halloween costume.  i don’t know who i’d be exactly, except for a crazy lady wearing giant white roses on her head.

amy instead put a few small flowers in my up-do and i wish i had a close-up of it because it turned out great.

and the dress is beautiful.  here’s me and my dashing soldier outside the ball.

doesn’t the dress look LONG?  it was actually a little bit too long and i did my best to not trip on it while dancing.  but such a beautiful shade of blue.  i brought the dress with me and had to change in the locker room at the swimming pool next door.  the floor was very icky and it was quite a trick to not let the dress or the hoop touch the floor.  luckily mom and sandy both helped me get into the thing.

the dance itself was…interesting.  by the time we got there the second set had started.  a woman gave all the ladies a dance card when we arrived, and i saw that the other ladies wore them over their wrists, so i did the same.

it was in some pavillion at a park in jacksonville, and there was a nice wooden floor.  kevin had to put tape on the bottoms of his shoes because he had metal…things…on the bottom and they would scuff the floor.  he sounds like he’s always tap-dancing when he walks around in the broughans.

there was a pretty good crowd there, and most of the people who were dancing were dressed in period attire, or at least kind of.  it was definitely a curious hodgepodge of all kinds of dresses and people and it seems that many of the people who do this sort of thing, well, they look just a little…different.  some of the older women looked like their dresses were pretty accurate, and some of the dresses looked homemade, and some wore those cotton day dresses which aren’t fancy at all, just big.  and the men – there were a few in military uniform, some in slacks, a couple in jeans.  there was one really crazy looking guy in a tuxedo with a top hat.  literally crazy-looking.

the band consisted of a woman fiddle player who was 6′ 3″ (dad struck up a conversation with her and of course found out how tall she was) and a guy playing a banjo.  they were good, and they had microphones, but they weren’t nearly loud enough, so it was odd to dance to such soft music.

they served refreshments – lemonade and water and the WORST COOKIES I’VE EVER HAD.  how can you screw up cookies so bad?  tastless snicker doodles, bland chocolate chip cookies, horrid oatmeal cookies.  blegh.

but we weren’t there for the cookies.  but cookies are very important to me.

anyway, the first dance we did was really just a long walk.  we lined up outside on the porch and marched in to the room as the music played, and made a big circle on the floor and came back around and hooked hands with another couple so we were walking four abreast, then eight.  but it was really just a lot of walking.

we did a few partner dances, but the group dances were the most unusual for me.  in one we had to dance with another couple, just a couple of turns with a different partner and then back to your partner and then we moved on to another couple. after doing it a couple of times, we got it.

but many of the people just couldn’t get the swing of it.  we did it over and over and over, so much that it started to get a little tiresome, but some people never figured it out.  maybe that’s why we did it so many times.  one time our other couple were these teenagers; he wore a white t-shirt with black printing on it, and she wore a long cotton dress.  they looked incredibly uncomfortable and awkward, and i don’t kow if it was because they couldn’t figure out the dance, because they had to briefly dance with someone else, or maybe if they weren’t a couple at all and he’d just asked her to dance and they were really shy.

at one point we danced with two little kids, and they were better than many of the other dancers.

during the break the tall fiddle player went outside for a smoke and we talked to mom and dad and my friend sandy, who were all watching.  they said it was highly entertaining to watch the different dancers.

this is a pretty good shot of the hair.  sandy took this picture; it wasn’t easy to get any good pictures using a digital camera with all the moving people.

there’s the fiddle player in the lower left – the microphone is awfully far away from her.

at one point when we came around, we stopped in front of mom so she could get a picture.

and that’s all the civil war excitement for this evening.  i must go look for cold white wine now.

ok then,

everything is good on monday grace.