MadJam 2013 Update #2
Smoke machines! Multi-colored light-shows on the walls! What a night of dancing!
PACKED ballroom last night, jammed until the last 25 dancers left to have breakfast at 6am. Louis and Helen – music was crazy great!
We walked out into the lobby at 1:30am to find a small city of bleary-eyed bed-headed black-coated Europeans and Asians clutching pillows, dragging suitcases staring into space passively zombie-like beaten down the way you get from a day in airports waiting to check in at the front desk and in lines at the registration table. MadJam is using the cool new ipad system (Chris Palmieri’s creation) we saw last summer at Swing Fling. Super cool (tied to the scoring system too, I think, which is even cooler – you sign your agreement on an ipad how cool is that!) but not super fast. Yet, anyway. I’m sure she’ll keep working on it.
Great energy here today! We’ve been watching pro-ams from morning till now in our room and on tv’s around every corner in the hotel. The lobby’s been humming with people all day – crowds at the front desk, crowds at the registration tables, crowds on the lobby floor taking private lessons, crowds in the shoe-hall buying shoes (Shoshi worked yesterday from 7am till 1am when they finally closed shop – she lost her voice from talking to customers 18 hours non-stop.)
The zillion dollar question: How are 1,600 people going to fit into this ballroom? There’s a second floor outside the ballroom (where the bar used to be – which is what the rennovation was: removal of the bar and remodeling of the hotel restaurant – the ballroom and guest rooms have not been redone) so maybe if the ballroom floor gets crowded some people will move out to the lobby? We shall see! The floor doesn’t look huge but I’ve learned that the apparent size of a floor can be deceptive and the actual size is often way smaller or way huger than it looks. Tonight’s late-nite dancing will tell the tale!
Impromptu zouk and bachata demonstrations tonight in the club lounge! The waitress was loving it but moved the couple away from the food when the wild hair-whips started flinging carrot sticks, celery and pot-stickers at the diners (just kidding. But she did move the couple. Cause the wild hair whips were actually whipping food across the room. No just kidding.)
I had the most incredible one-and-one-half-handed massage today. Melissa Greene – smart, superbly sensitive, talented massage therapist – fell on her hand last night and busted half of it. The other half performed magic – can’t overemphasize enough. She’s here all weekend – grab some time if you can!