Double-Squeeze, please? / Einmal doppelt drücken?
Michael „Osz“ Brandt, Yvonne Essberger, Double:You Squeezers Wuppertal

In the beginning there was just a caller who was new in the area, a small circle of friends, the sunny and maybe a little wettish town of Wuppertal and a simple question: how can it be, that such a distinguished city still has no square dance club?

We knew, even if some of our foundation members had not been graduated yet, that we would found this club. But we were also aware of the fact, that besides our own dedication to it, success would depend on the help of our friends, because when we presented ourselves for the first time live in public at the Langer Tisch (“long desk”) in Wuppertal (that’s a special kind of town fair), we weren’t able to set up a whole square out of our own ranks. So many names can’t be listed here, but we thank all our friends from our hearts. In fact – we had so many helpers and dancers there, that sometimes we were able to dance with 2 complete squares. We were well prepared for the upcoming event, indeed, even the badges luckily arrived on the morning of day X.

Okay – let’s talk about the badge: You can’t come up with anything without our suspension railway in Wuppertal, so just the question about the additional mascot remained – trample or waddle? There was Tuffi, the elephant that had jumped out of the suspension railway in former times, but after a more or less passionate discussion (and because our treasurer Bine really loves them), we decided to recruit a wupperwaddler as mascot on our badges. Penguins have a young but strong tradition in Wuppertal. There´s a very modern penguin arena at the zoo and you will find many differently designed sculptures of Polar inhabitant throughout the valley, relicts of the Pinguin arena.

The Pingu got a red mask and red feet to fit the colours we had chosen for the letters of our club-name. At first “Valley Squeezers” was thought to be the best name for us, but then we found out that there is another new club with this name in a valley not so far from Wuppertal. In any case we were not going to give up being Squeezers, so we replaced the Valley by the Wupper, and the Wupper with the initial letter double-(yo)u. Finally, we substituted the hyphen with a colon, and hey, there we had the Double:You Squeezers.

After the secretary Vonni had modified the badge to its final appearance, she built our homepage (just have a look at: www.dysw.de ), president Achim was all the while giving out orders to smile and keep on working, steadily running around to come up with supplies for our needs, and Caller Osz, dealing as Vice did his homework on the bylaws and a presentation for public relations. And last but not least, we started out on a quest for a dance-location…

We accidentally discovered the location for our needs on a Sunday walk, a nice gym, and luckily for rental at special conditions. This room was not reserved for anyone on the one day of the week we preferred for the club nights: Wednesday. We had taken care that only a few clubs in our region had chosen the same day, in order to start with good conditions for visitors as well as the club.

Do you know the meaning of the word Justizvollzugsschule (justice school)? Most people don’t. No - this is not a school where young prisoners learn anything about the law – far from it: it is here where jailers learn how to turn the key. Nevertheless lots of visitors ask, if they should take along their identity card on a club visit. Actually someone in the EAASDC – we won’t point at anyone special ;-) – well that someone did publish Justizvollzugsanstalt (jail) in the Bulletin.

Our next important event was the first club night. The dance location would have been easy to find, if the local council had not decided to put a road block halfway up the street, leaving both ends separated. After most of our visitors succeeded in mastering this challenge (don´t trust your satellite navigation system!), we started with 55 dancers from 21 clubs. Pictures of this event are provided on our homepage. It was a happy evening, encouraging us to look forward to a good future.

The penguins however, our travelling banners, did manage to stay at home that day – since then some of these styro-waddlers – with a miniature-badge attached – have “flown” out, one of them made it all the way to England! We gave birth to our mascots at a special kind of board meeting, using lots of red colour, glue and handicraft tools. Even our junior, Nico, was busily painting penguin feet.

In the meantime we have grown to complete one square, because some graduated, footloose dancers have joined the team. With the background of good relationships to other clubs in our region, we are now looking forward to our most important upcoming events: open house and class.

See you in a Square, friends!

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