The name of the club is Happy Hoppers, and in Danny Williamson’s case, it is literally true. You can’t miss the way Williamson adds his own gleeful bobs and bounces, struts and skips to the moves crooned by the caller.
“I think square dancing is the greatest thing on Earth,” said Williamson’s wife, Carol, who said she and Danny got into it about five years ago because they needed to lose weight. A long-haul truck-driving lifestyle was doing their bodies no good, Carol said, and Danny’s doctor’s harangues eventually culminated in a warning that if he didn’t get in shape soon, his inevitable dance partner would be an oxygen tank.
So the couple became Happy Hoppers. That’s one of Clark County’s premier square dancing clubs, offering dances on the first and third Saturday of each month, and cycles of lessons at every level starting on the first Monday night each month. All hopping takes place at the Clark County Square Dance Center, at 10713 N.E. 117th Ave. in Brush Prairie.
Carol Williamson said she used to weigh 250 pounds but has dropped at least 50 since she and Danny started dancing, here and elsewhere, five or even six nights a week.
Square dancing has many levels to learn, master
What’s known as modern Western square dancing comes in different levels of defined expertise. You can spend weeks or months memorizing the basics — and a lifetime mastering it all.
At the basic Mainstream level, there are 69 calls, and Mainstream Plus tops it off at 100. The Happy Hoppers are a Mainstream Plus club, and Monday night Mainstream Plus lessons start at 6:30 p.m. with folks who are pretty experienced with what caller Jim Hattrick throws at them: moves like “Ocean Crossing,” “Load the Boat,” “Change the Gears” and “Trade the Wave” — in addition to your basic “Do-si-do” and “Promenade.”
Then at 7:30 p.m., there’s a lesson for total beginners — with the more experienced dancers leading by example, according to Marc Kahn. That’s followed by a Mainstream lesson at 9 p.m., where the advanced and the newbies meet in the middle.
Higher levels are Advanced and Challenge levels. The Happy Hoppers don’t usually hop there.
— Scott Hewitt
Such frequency doesn’t appear unusual. Organizers Tom and Liza Halpenny do some sort of folk dancing four nights a week, Tom said. He’s retired from Hewlett Packard; Liza works part-time and teaches folk dance throughout the region.
“It’s social and it’s healthy. It’s a great way to connect with people. Our thinking is, it’s our health care plan,” Tom said.
Modern caller
Square dancing as health insurance sounds like a great idea, but it’s no guarantee. Just ask caller Jim Hattrick.
It’s no exaggeration to call Hattrick, 68, a living legend in Clark County’s square dance community — which was watching in suspense as its resident caller recently endured a risky, unpredictable and painfully drawn-out health scare.
Last fall Hattrick suffered a perforated bowel and was rushed into emergency surgery. It was “in a place that had to heal itself,” he said, but seven months later, additional surgery had to correct what wasn’t healing. “I probably just about died two or three times there,” Hattrick said, and he spent months hooked up to machines and getting nutrition through tubes.
“I’ve been on liquid. I just started eating food about a month ago,” Hattrick said in late September, on the first Monday night he was back with the Happy Hoppers after his health issues.
The silver lining in that scary story, he said, is the mob of great friends who embraced him and his wife, Judy — who is doing well herself despite a diagnosis of breast cancer in the midst of all this, Hattrick said. There have been benefit dances “from Canada to Montana,” as well as right here in Clark County, he said.
“So many friends and so many dances. The square dance community really came together,” he said. “We feel so fortunate and so grateful to have so many good friends.”
The dances were so far-flung because of Hattrick’s long career as a caller — 56 years and counting, he said. He attended his first dance at age 12 and discovered that he had two definitely left feet — and that the more experienced dancers had no problem pulling him through. He grew up to call and teach all over North America and also to record for Chinook Records, which records and distributes square dance music worldwide.
Hattrick’s standard presentation these days is a far cry from the swinging bluegrass you might expect. There’s no live guitar or fiddle, just P.A. speakers, a laptop computer and a surprisingly diverse collection of gently bouncy tracks, from blues to reggae. At one point on Monday night, the whole room was grooving to “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
“That’s what you call modern square dancing,” Hattrick said.
Brain, body and heart
Friendship and the fountain of youth is what most folks mention, almost in the same breath, when you ask why they love square dancing. “It keeps you young. I’ve met so many people,” said Myrna Loy — not the movie star, but looking pretty great at age 70 nonetheless. Loy and her friend Frances are both single and find square dancing an easy way to make new friends, they said. They joined up together last year.
“I’ve been dancing for three girlfriends, and I’m working on my fourth,” said Dennis Lemke, who lives up in the northeast Clark County hills and comes dancing to manage his weight and avoid isolation.
And then there’s Marc Kahn, a retired computer programmer with a taste for “abstract thinking” who said he loves the intellectual stimulation.
“It’s a geometric puzzle,” Kahn said. Caller Hattrick “takes people and moves them all over the place in these intricate combinations and patterns. It doesn’t seem possible but he gets everybody back where they started. It’s absolutely incredible,” Kahn said.
Plus, he added: “It’s important to keep your brain young.” Square dancing is “the perfect way” to integrate brain, body and heart, he said.
Bouncing along with everyone else on that recent Monday night was Hogen Bays, a Buddhist abbot and teacher at the Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Ore., who said he’s been square dancing for 30 years. The challenge to stay both peacefully present and completely busy is totally in keeping with Zen practice, he said. “It’s meditation in action,” he said.
Plus, Bays added: “It’s the most democratic thing I’ve ever done. Everybody is equal on the dance floor.”
That’s one of the many beauties inherent in trying to follow all those complex, coded directions. When things fall apart, as they inevitably do, it’s met with good humor and patience. Everything just as easily comes back together, too.
Hattrick offered what seemed like contradictory advice on Monday night: He reminded the more experienced dancers that one of his main rules is, “Don’t help anybody.”
Why not? Because things start to slow down and fragment even more.
Instead, reference Hattrick’s most-basic rule of all: “When you’re not sure what you’re doing, do something. It really is true. Just move to the beat.”
