Friday dancing put the festival in high gear

If it was possible to go “back to the future” you could visualize it all happening last Friday night in downtown Littleton.

The main parking lot in Littleton could have been any Carolina beach, the time could have been the summer in the 1950’s or 60’s, the breeze blowing through the air, the 90+ temperature slowly coming down to make it at least bearable, the feeling that this was going to be a good night for dancing and living in the present with the memories of the past. 

The streets closed off early so the crowd could start to form for the evenings anticipated event. People dressed as they desired. Some wore their summer best, others came in  their beach clothes, the common thread was they all dressed for a fun, relaxing evening. 

Early arrivals got the best area to set up their chairs. They started forming a half-circle allowing enough room between them and the bandstand for the people to dance. Two hours till show time, couple by couple they arrived. Courtesy hellos were shared all around, sometimes to new friends sometimes to old life long friends. The air was filled with anticipation of a good time.  

It could have been the 50’s or 60’ but it was 2007 and those Carolina beach music lovers of yesteryear were once again on hand to prove that all you need to have a good time is good music and a ‘come for fun’ attitude.

They were gathering in downtown Littleton to celebrate another year and kick off another Littleton-Lake Gaston Festival. By 6 p.m. more than 200 people had started to line the area around the stage. When the band The Castaways started to warm up it was a signal that the fun was going to begin soon. More and more people arrived. The early crowd was a mixture of young and old, with the old outnumbering everyone else.

The first warm up song was the classic, Mustang Sally. Everyone was ready to dance, but they all new it wasn’t time yet. By 7 p.m., the scheduled start time, had rolled around the crowd numbered over two hundred. When Steve Owens and Karen Clayton started singing “10 ways of loving you,” the early dancers, who could not wait for the crowd to get into the mood made their way to the dance area and the unofficial start of the 2007 Littleton-Lake Gaston Festival was underway.

The songs kept coming and two by two the dance area filled up with more and more dancers. The shag was still the dance of the evening. As they played their way through a list with songs like “Carolina Girls,” “I Love the Nightlife, “Crazy,” and “Sweet Life” more and more people made their way to the dance area. 

This was a night for shagging, the beach dance that you never forget. The shag may be the original state dance of South Carolina, but it has become the official dance of both the Carolinas. Northerners jitterbugged their way through the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, on the Atlantic beaches of the south shagging was what the in crowd did to some of the best dancing music ever created.  It was a sign of the night that most slow dances found fewer couples on the floor than the fast ones.  

For those who may have forgotten a step or two they were eager to seek someone out to show them. It made no difference if you were on the dance floor or just came to watch, the entire mood was infectious. By 9 p.m. the crowd numbered more than 400 people.

What a great way to start off a weekend.