We are having a strange year, with an absence of our usual hiking, thus no posts for a while. Still, we took in the Galapagos, and some of Ecuador. That may be a future post, but this one is about our friends Tom and Patricia, and his video of Chuck's annual Zydeco birthday party. Tom has a gift for faces, and skip my text to watch it if need be. However, I can give it more context.
In January of 2004, Susan was giving a Camino de Santiago presentation at the San Francisco Sierra Club's annual dinner meeting. After the show, Tom and Patricia came up and told about their own experiences walking the Camino, and we have been friends ever since. One of the things we share besides the Camino is a love of Cajun & Zydeco music. Two cultures, sometimes the identical songs, but a different rhythm. Heads bobbing up and down at a Cajun festival, and fairly level at a Zydeco festival. Separate venues in most cases, but a lot of Cajun dancers going to Zydeco events, and here in the SF Bay Area, there is some separation of venues, but a lot of crossover. Mostly you will find this music in southern Louisiana and southwest Texas, but there is a large contingent here in the San Francisco bay area, due to workers imported from Louisiana during world war II to build ships. I'm still getting to Tom's video.
I tore off a slip of paper on a telephone pole twenty seven years ago, that said "change your life, learn to dance", and started taking Cajun Zydeco dance lessons from Diana Castillo. I met Susan shortly after, dragged her to the lessons, and we were hooked, searching for venues both locally and in Louisiana. At the local events we would see many of the same faces, one of them being Chuck's. One of the features of this music is the house party. The music is imbedded into the fabric of daily life. Push back the chairs, invite your friends, bring out the accordion and fiddle, and everybody dances, from kids to grannies, and everybody is smiling. No one sits unless they are physically unable to dance.
Well, Chuck has hosted an annual party around his birthday for more years than I can remember. It was too big for a living room, so in the earlier years it would be in a local park, potluck fashion with the local musicians. The last few years it has been at the
Nature Friends, a local German club with a big outdoor dance floor. We were there yesterday with Tom and Patricia. My potluck offering was
Willie's Crisp, which I've written about earlier. We caught up with
Diana Castillo, still giving lessons, who has known us almost our entire life as a couple. Tom has his video up on Youtube already. Most of it is filming during one of the band's number and the music never stops, so that part is unedited.
Tom has shared a very special multicultural event and it is my pleasure to try and get it out to a larger audience:
Chucks annual Cajun Zydeco birthday party
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