Let’s dance: Heed the call with Peanut Squares
Members of the Peanut Squares Square Dancing Club listening to instructions from caller Jim Yoest of Shaler Township.
Jim Yoest of Shaler Township calls the action for the Peanut Squares.
Jack Cooper still enjoys square dancing at 91.
As you might recall from trying to follow the steps during junior high gym class, square dancing can be tough.
But not to worry.
“If you mess up,” Sara Frey said, “there actually is like a whole list of rules, and one of them is that you don’t comment on how other people dance. You have to be understanding.”
As secretary for the Peanut Squares Square Dancing Club, the Upper St. Clair resident has plenty of opportunity to hone her skills. Still, she’ll admit to sometimes missing a call: “I just hope somebody grabs me and pushes me” into the proper place.
The Peanut Squares – “The club was started by a man named Charlie Brown,” Frey explained – have been meeting regularly since 1979, currently at Covenant-Community Presbyterian Church in Scott Township. On most Tuesday nights, you’ll hear a professional caller give instructions to perhaps a couple of dozen people. “We don’t know what he’s going to say until he says it,” Paul Rinald, club president and a Mt. Lebanon resident, said. “Sometimes I don’t think he knows what he’s going to say. And the idea is to follow the leader, to do what he says. He mixes us up all over the place, and if he’s good – and most callers are pretty good – he will get you back to where you started.”
The calls are at the heart of square dancing, and relative knowledge of them determines the levels of proficiency that participants can achieve, including basic, mainstream, plus and advanced.
“Peanut Squares is basically a ‘plus’ club at this point,” Rinald said “That means we know so many calls, more than a basic dancer, more than a mainstream dancer. There are 50 or 52 calls in the basic list. There are another 15 calls in the mainstream list, and another 20 in the plus list. You just have additional sets of calls. That’s all there is to it.”
As for the total number of calls associated with square dancing:
“I can find you a book that is this thick,” Rinald said, making the vertical equivalent of the “I caught a fish this big” motion, “with all the calls listed and how to do them. It’s huge. And nobody knows all the calls.”
Whatever the case, they’re pretty much universal.
“One thing is that if I learn – and I have learned – the ‘plus’ calls here, I can go to Japan and find a ‘plus’ club. And I’d be able to dance there. I do not know one word of Japanese, but the calls are in English. When they learn calls in Japan, they are learning ‘circle left.’ They are learning ‘do-si-do.’ They are learning ‘swing your partner.'”
Learning to square dance starts with those kinds of basics, and soon enough participants might be doing steps such as “swap the wave” and “unwrap the interlocked diamond.”
“It’s challenging,” Frey said. “It’s really good for your mind. You have to think about the call and do the call. I just think it’s really fun.”
Rinald refers to the whole process involving the caller as a puzzle.
“He says something, and you have to interpret that into motion, which sometimes is a little tricky. The calls get put together by every caller a little differently. You have to think about it before the caller does the next three calls that he’ll be throwing at you.”
After three years of dancing, Frey said that she always is continuing to learn.
“But I think we’re all still learning.”
Free square dance lessons will be held at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 8 at Southminster Presbyterian Church, 799 Washington Road, Mt. Lebanon. A Western Night open house with the Peanut Squares is from 7:30 to 10 p.m. Sept. 13 at Covenant-Community Presbyterian Church, 1630 Greentree Road, Scott Township. For more information, call 412-478-6318 or 412-735-2423.