Rumors of the pending demise of Morris Dancing have now been covered by that esteemed public radio news show "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!". Yes folks, Peter Sagal has been duped into reporting that Morris Dancing will die out in a generation because today's youth find it embarrassing.
Now to be fair to the good folks at "Wait wait", their job is to find the ridiculous, yet news worthy items from the preceding week's news and mock them further. And a fine job they did! We laughed, we feigned indignant responses, we laughed, we forward the link to everybody on the Maroon Bells mailing list and then we laughed some more.
And why were we laughing? Well, because this rumor is far from true. Perhaps the Morris Ring just wanted to generate some press, but here along the Front Range of Colorado our Morris sides are alive and capering, including our youth "farm team" the Tommyknockers. My daughter was a "tommy" and after ferrying her from gig to gig for a year I figured that I may as well be dancing too. (Okay, there was also the allure of some mighty fine home brew.)
We just danced out at the Berkely Community Church's Epiphany Celebration - Our dancers ranged in age from 16 to 70+. Several of those dancers were new to Morris within the last couple years. Morris Dancing dieing? Ha! Who's spreading these rumors!?!
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