Melbourne Swing Festival - Day 1 (Friday)

05/06/2015

A big thank you to my friend to Fudz Qazi who let me use his amazing photographs of the event.

My first ever volunteer shift was on Friday evening at the door for the festival's first social dancing, which was happening at the Ormond Hall, 557 St Kilda Road. How exciting!!

I'd gone for a slightly later shift (8:45pm) as I didn't see a problem to get to the venue in time after my working day in Sunshine finishes at 5pm.

Ha!! Not in big Melbourne! I left work with a little delay, missed a train, therefore missed the connection bus from Footscray to my new place in Flemington and had to learn that the 6pm bus was the last one of the day for the direct connection! My best friend the PTV app guided me to a bus stop a couple of streets up from which the delayed bus was taking over half an hour to get to a tram stop near my place. 

When I finally made it to that stop I could see the tram from the back heading away from me as fast as it possibly could! The next one was 20 minutes later. By the time I rushed through my front door it had taken me almost 2.5 hours to get back and the relaxing shower I’d planned turned into a VERY quick one as I only had 15 minutes to get ready to run out again for the next tram. A trip to St Kilda Road from mine is just over an hour.

My shift started at 8:45pm and I came through the door at 8:43pm, hungry as a horse as there was no way I’d had time to fit in food. I'd put my new skirt on and was wearing my nice blue jumper, the only one that’s not a hoody. I walked up to the reception and had a lovely welcome. Everyone was quite relaxed and I was told my shift wouldn't start at 9pm and I should chill out :-)!

I hid my blue rain coat as well as I could in my bag and sneaked through the big doors to the dance floor. Wow! Beautiful people everywhere! Amazing dresses, smart suits and shoes, braces and hats everywhere. In that moment I just wanted another jumper or my nicest dress so I could blend in. Instead I was just telling myself it wasn't that bad and nobody would notice, or even care.

Later I found out what had happened. I'm normally good at not reading things properly and I did it again. There was a dress code on the invite: 'Whatever makes you ridiculously good-looking'. Yes! Everyone passed! Very impressive :-)!

After 15 minutes watching ridiculously good-looking people dance to beautiful music, I made my way back to the door feeling rather shy. Again I got a warm welcome and swapped seats with somebody who must have been in the previous shift.

I was filled in quickly by lovely Karryn who had everything under control. The main task was to find people on the list, tick them off and hand over their pass. 

So from one minute to the other, I was kind of representing the Swing Patrol Melbourne in my blue jumper, welcoming all dancers that had travelled far or not so far to be part of the Melbourne Swing Festival. Ooooh!

It was kind of funny that I had no idea if it was somebody from interstate or a regular dancer as they were all new faces to me. I was introduced to some people and also had the chance again to practice understanding how Australians spell using vowels (in their names) :-). I can proudly say that I do get better at this. Having suburbs spelt over the phone at work has been a good exercise. 

When it got a bit quieter I had a portion of the best chips I'd ever tasted and nice chats with my shift mates. I even had to be reminded of the end of my shift. 

I'd learnt my lesson from Thursday: Never ‘don't care’ when last trams run if you live in a big city and walking is not an option! This time I checked and as I had to catch two trams to make it back I had about 30 minutes left for some dancing. 

I had lovely dances with some really good leads and could have had more but left on time to make it home independently this time. 

What a great night! The only thing I really can't stand is having to leave a party early if I don't feel like it. In this case it was especially true as I'd found out about an after party happening. 

When I was sitting in the tram, I decided to make sure that it’d be different next time and usually things fall into place after such a decision has been made :).