During that time, I danced when I could, but I was working full-time and also taking six graduate credits a semester in library science. I was determined not to drag this college degree out over several years like the last one. There were times that the Thursday nights at Rena’s were the only social outlet I had all week long, including the weekends.

I didn’t know it at the time, since I was at that time at the fringes of the clogging scene, but finding a place that welcomed cloggers was not an easy thing. When I eventually was in a position to find a place for the clogging, what I offered the restaurant management was a steady, paying crowd one night a week. In return, I was allowed to bring in old-time bands of my choosing for cloggers to dance to. No money exchanged hands directly from me to the restaurant or vice versa, and I’m pretty sure that was the deal with my predecessors in the role of clog impresario of D.C.

It was the nature of the places that would have us, that they were restaurants somewhat down on their luck. Every once in a while, the cloggers would need to find a new meeting place due to changes in the restaurant’s management or financial solvency. And so it came to pass that some time in 1984, Rena’s Place ceased to be a venue for the clogging.

As for what the cloggers wanted, here’s what Dorothy Schultz said in the Capital Clogger’s Club newsletter, after Rena’s Place closed down:

“Of course, a wood floor … with just a little give to it and just the right amount of wax or John’s special corn or rice meal dried powder on it so they can slide instead of slip. For size it must not be too small, although for one person, a 3′ x 3′ step-a-tune will do. And it must not be too large either, or have too few cloggers on it. They like to be just close enough to get an energy boost from each other’s batteries. Julie says she likes to feel as if she is dancing in a phone booth. It is a bit dangerous though. Patsy got kicked in the thumb again on the 26th. Please be more careful when you kick and watch out for Patsy’s thumbs.

“Next, they like the string band music to be southern style–moderate to fast speed–and bouncing off the walls–loud, but not deafening, being still able to carry on a conversation.

“They like long tables, with space for lots of shoes underneath, and comfortable chairs. The temperature should be on the cool side because they always warm it up. Smoke free air is nice also. … A millionaire or two wouldn’t hurt to help the proprietor’s frame of mind. That’s all we ask. Know any place like that?”

Months passed in which the cloggers had to content themselves with clogging on the sidelines at the contra dances, or at a private party. Still, they longed for a place to call their own with a real, live band and a wooden dance floor. This time, the resourceful individual who answered the call was Mike Marlin. It was Mike who did three important things in the history of clogging in the D.C. area: he made an agreement with Captain White’s Oyster Bar in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland; he started an informative and entertaining newsletter called The Daily Clog; and he dubbed the cloggers’ new home with a name: The Clog Palace, or in full, “The World Famous Captain White’s Oyster Bar & Clog Palace.”

The rest is history.

Appalachian Clogging 101
Learn to clog to old-time music, make friends, hang out in the bars dancing and drinking beer with other cloggers, travel to other states to camp in a open field among hundreds of hippies and rednecks, listening to music and dancing ’til all hours of the night. Eventually you will publish a monthly newsletter, and hire musicians for old-time dancing, haul sound systems and portable dance floors once a week for nearly a decade.

If it had, I’m sure I would have passed that class by, and taken belly dancing instead. Although, come to think of it, belly dancing might have led me toward a different, yet just as life-changing, course of events. I guess now we’ll never know.

At the time I signed up for the Appalachian clogging class, I was 24, and living alone in my first apartment away from the only house I’d lived in since I was born. Even though I’d only moved five miles away from the Mangin homestead in Wheaton, Maryland, I was indeed on my own for the first time. Leaving home and taking the clogging class were only two of several life-changing events in my life at that time. Those stories, however, belong on my other blog.

I had discovered clogging for myself while listening to a bluegrass band in a seafood restaurant in Rockville, Maryland, some time in 1979. The band, Stars & Bars, had a teen-aged girl (Missy Raines, now a nationally-known bluegrass musician) playing bass who kicked up some steps during one of the songs, and I was entranced by what I saw. She had a big smile on her face, and it was clear that her dancing was yet another way for her to express the joy she felt in music. I didn’t know the name for her kind of dancing, but later on, when I saw the clogging class announcement in Montgomery County’s adult education course schedule, I figured it was the same thing. At least I knew it wasn’t belly dancing.

The first thing I learned from our instructor, Karen Kuhel (who danced with the Footloose Cloggers) was that she did not teach people to dance to bluegrass music, only “old-time music.” I didn’t know at the time what old-time music was. She gave us a brief description of it, but I had to figure the rest out on my own. Fortunately, she told us that there was a place in Takoma Park where you could go and hear a live old-time band and dance to it.

Before I ventured there, I went to the public library where I worked and searched the record collection for anything resembling the music Karen played in class. I managed to find one Clark Kessinger album, to which I practiced my clogging after class. I could never count on picking up the steps on the fly in class; I usually had to try to memorize the movements and work on them repeatedly during the week that followed. I was always a lesson behind the better dancers in class, but I persevered. A week after the final class, I had learned everything that Karen had to teach about clogging.

It took a while before I, too, could express my musical pleasure through my feet. But when I did, it almost felt like flying. When the music and the mood was right, it was as if I was lifted ever so slightly off the floor as my feet shuffled, chugged, and stomped along. It was a Zen-like feeling, and from the moment that I finally “got” clogging, I began to seek out live music to dance to as often as possible. Live music was important because it was part of the Zen-ness of clogging, that feeling of being in the moment. Plus, back then we only had vinyl LP recordings. Records skipping while you danced to them was a major problem for cloggers.

Eventually, I made it out to the Takoma Tap Room, which was a local bar in Takoma Park, Maryland. It was a dive, but one night a week, there was an old-time band playing, and cloggers shuffling away. It wasn’t long before I became a regular. The cloggers and others who came to listen to the music, formed a quirky subculture that formed the basis of the social network that sustains me today.