Still Dancing the Night Away

Ah, Caltech. Home of Nobel laureates, merry undergraduate pranksters--and Israeli folk dancers.

Alive--if struggling slightly--after 25 years, the Caltech Israeli Folk Dance group gathered on a recent evening in a Pasadena church hall to celebrate its silver anniversary. Their motto: “Keep the Circle Going.”

Among devotees who came from near and far was Hal David, who founded the group while a Caltech grad student. Today, he’s a biologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.--and still folk dancing.

David learned Israeli dance while a counselor at a local Jewish camp. Later, at Caltech, he went regularly to a dance group at UCLA. As “there weren’t many women at Caltech,” he decided that starting a group there might attract women to the campus.

“Exactly one month before I started this group,” he recalls, “I met my wife at UCLA. So the whole thing was redundant.” For him.

But the Caltech dancers prospered, although today Caltech students are a minority of the membership of about 100, a fact the dancers hope to change through campus outreach.

Each Sunday night, a core group of 20 to 30 devotees meets in Winnett Lounge on campus. Over the years, members have included Christians, Jews and Muslims. “The music strikes a chord with a lot of people,” explains Judy Wiener, who joined in the ‘70s.

It’s not all “Hava Nagila. . . .” Israel is a young country, and its music and dance are still evolving, a mix of Arabic and Eastern European influences with contemporary overtones. Anniversary celebrants danced traditional line and circle dances to music from 1950s LPs and original dances choreographed by their current leader, Darcel Jones.

Jones, 40, a former Pasadena High football player, is African American and a car detailer by trade. His introduction to Israeli dance was, he says, “pretty strange.” One evening in the ‘70s, he’d planned to go bowling. As he waited for a bus, a passing motorist offered him a ride, saying he was going folk dancing. Would Jones like to tag along?

Jones did. Soon, he was dancing five nights a week until his “legs burnt out.” Now, this is someone whose idea of music at the time was the Temptations. Middle Eastern music, he acknowledges, is “an acquired taste. The women sing like cats on a fence, real high and nasal.” And now he loves it.

Ronit Woodside, a preschool teacher, came to folk dance more conventionally. Born in Israel, she connected with the group when she moved here 14 years ago. She loves dancing because of “the free-flowing movement and seeing people connected. This is what Israel is about, connectedness.”

Rick Cofield, 42, another former leader of the Caltech dancers, joined while a Caltech student. “Caltech’s a very monastic kind of life. I met my wife folk dancing,” he explains. He’s now a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer and he and wife Lucie still come occasionally, attracted by “the lively spirit.” He laments, “Kids aren’t doing this, but we’re trying to bring ours in.”

John Louie and wife Neva Donovan brought their children, Anna, 4, and Benjamin, 3 months. Says Donovan: “They’ve been dancing since before they were born.”

Louie joined this group as a Caltech grad student about 10 years ago, after years of resisting the efforts of his parents, who were members, to interest him. While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, he started a group there. The couple now live in Reno, where he teaches at the University of Nevada and she is a medical doctor. A nice place to bring up kids, she says, but, “There’s no dancing. That’s what we really miss.”

Tapping his feet in their pointed-toe Macedonian-style sandals, or opankes , was Ralph David, 80, Hal David’s father and a dedicated folk dancer from Fallbrook. Not missing a dance was Marilyn Pixler of La Can~ada, 70-plus, a real estate agent, retired teacher and lifelong dance enthusiast. “My mother always wanted me to be a Shirley Temple,” she says, “but I didn’t like that kind of dancing.” Folk dance is her thing. For years, she taught a group of Caltech children, some of whom still dance. As kids, she says, “They fought it. They didn’t want to touch hands.”

In the center of a circle of dancers, Jones is calling steps. “Yemenite, cross, Yemenite, cross.” Every dancer knows that the yemenite is a side-behind-crossover step, just as they know that the grapevine is a cross-behind-side-cross-front step.

These dancers are an eclectic lot in Hawaiian shirts, jeans, harem pants, tie-dyed Ts and Bermuda shorts. The common denominator is enthusiasm. They clap, they shout, they joyfully raise linked arms.

There are two birthday cakes to be cut. But first, there is a moment of silence, a moment to remember slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The dance that follows is a dance of peace.

Celebrating Suffrage

WOMEN DON’T WANT BALLOT

The great majority of California women . . . do not want to vote; they depend upon the manhood of California to protect them from the responsibility of the ballot. . . .

So said a full-page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 9, 1911, the eve of a special California election that included the vote for women.

Fifteen years earlier, women’s suffrage had been defeated in California despite the efforts of 75-year-old Susan B. Anthony, who spent months in the state drumming up support. (For the record, the measure carried in Los Angeles County.)

But by 1911, it was an idea whose time had come, as California became the sixth suffrage state, joining Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho and Washington. “The California election of 1911 really heralded the beginning of the new age” for the movement, says UCLA history professor Ellen DuBois. That age would culminate with passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.

DuBois is co-curator with Karen Kearns of the Huntington Library in San Marino of “Votes for Women: A 75th Anniversary Celebration,” an exhibit now on view at the Huntington.

There are photos and manuscripts of principal players--Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Alice Park. And there are oddities, such as a 1913 ad for Shredded Wheat, a company that was quick to link profits to political correctness: “Two million women will have a right to vote in the next presidential election. Twenty million women have voted for the emancipation of American womanhood by serving Shredded Wheat.”

The exhibit, which fills two rooms painted yellow (the official color of the California campaign) was previewed at a reception hosted by the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation, which promotes philanthropic giving to women and girls.

DuBois reminded guests of the endurance of the suffragists--three generations of women who joined hands across class and racial lines, among them middle-class club women not unlike those who “have gotten sort of a bad rap in the last 40 or 50 years.”

Today, when many Americans don’t vote, the exhibit takes on added meaning, she believes. We can be amused by the naivete of those women’s rights pioneers who first met in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848--and those who marched and demonstrated in the face of ridicule--or “we can be inspired by their conviction.”

The exhibit continues through Jan. 28.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.