Dudes In Geneva: Swingin' the detector, rockin' the kids

Hi, all,

This weekend has been one for missing the U.S. and its pop culture. While I was slogging through the finances on Saturday I was also watching old movies on the "slingbox", like the old Airport movies (did you know the namesake for the first movie was good ol' MSP?) and the even older westerns like The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Then today we were tired of the same old music to play - where's good ol' American radio when you need it? In America, I guess! Next best thing: youtube. You can dial up just about anything there. So we thought we'd play songs we hadn't heard in a while, and settled on some southern chicken-fried rock like Alabama, Lynnyrd Skynnyrd, and Molly Hatchet. B shows a potential aptitude for syncopation...

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

Speaking of youtube and pop culture, this guy competes with Homer for my favorite Simpson's character (this one is also fun, but has one profanity). I had a lot of fun recently watching old interviews of the people that voice the Simpsons (see here and here if you're a fan - add any you like in the comments :).

I had another chance recently to recall the fun we had with our friends back in the U.S. One of my co-workers, a German by the name of Arno, arranged to have some of us pay a birthday tribute to Frankie Manning. This is apparently a world-wide phenomenon. Frankie Manning is turning 95 this year and people are paying tribute to him around the world by swing dancing in the most unusual places.

Who's Frankie Manning, you say? My swing-dancing friends back home know! From the official web site:

Swing dancer extraordinaire Frankie Manning was a leading dancer at Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom where, in the mid-1930s, he revolutionized the course of the lindy hop with his innovations, including the lindy air step and synchronized ensemble lindy routine...
Considered the world's leading authority on the lindy, he is highlighted in Ken Burns's acclaimed documentary, Jazz. His autobiography, Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop, co-written by Cynthia R. Millman, was published by Temple University Press in spring 2007.

...and for those of you who don't know, K and I met through a swing dance club and learned the lindy hop together in Minneapolis through TC Swing and the Land O' Loons Lindy Hoppers (now defunct). We got a chance recently to participate in a swing dance through the CERN dance club. We took G with us and put her car seat on a table in the corner, and she watched us all night long without crying!

Now swing dance has a core of dedicated enthusiasts throughout Europe as well, but I was still surprised to find out a big guy like Arno was so into it that he and his girlfriend even run their own website dedicated to their swing activities. So he decided to round up as many people as he could to pay tribute to Frankie from the depths of the CMS cavern - because when you think of it, who else would even be able to? Me? Tscha-ha! Because Arno took "CMS guide" training, he was able to get visitor access to the cavern, entry to which is now more tightly controlled.

This last Wednesday we arranged to meet at the surface hall at noon, and then took the large elevator down to level -2. We all had to go singly through the one person access booth that has doors on each side - smaller than a phone booth. The funny story behind this is that the access booth is so finicky that Arno literally could not get through it - he had to go the long way around to the other access point to get in.

Once we finally got in, he had to face another difficulty, which is that, of course, most physicists don't know the first thing about dancing, much less swing dancing. So instead Arno and his girlfriend taught us the basic "Electric Slide". He set up the camera on the top balcony on the far side of the detector. The final obstacle was simply the lack of space - cables, scaffolding, staircases all get in the way. Man, can't they see we're dancing here? So blame us if we don't find the Higgs - at least we had fun...

Anyway, we did a couple of takes, and then he took his videos home for mixing and editing, and came up with this (sorry, I couldn't get the video to embed properly here).

Then a couple of us stuck around a little more to film him and his girlfriend doing the "Shim Sham Shimmy" - remember this step, guys? And at the end they break into standard lindy hop/charleston figures.