Load the...Bus?

Load the...Bus?
by Thomas A Tripp Jr.

Back in 1985 I attended my first IAGSDC® convention in Denver, Colorado. I found Denver to be such a lovely and congenial city that I stayed on for a few days after the convention. Then I left and spent a week in my oId home town of Chicago to visit friends. On the way back to San Francisco my plane stopped over in Denver again and I decided to stay and spend another week there exploring and square dancing.

By that time, San Francisco had already successfully bid to host the 1986 convention and I was heavily involved in that effort. When I returned home from my travels I reflected on the great time that I had in Denver, both dancing and sight-seeing. I shared those thoughts with my good friend Eddie Smith (deceased 1993). Eddie was a wonderful sounding board for creative and intuitive ideas. As we chatted, we thought about all of the great sight-seeing opportunities in San Francisco and, wouldn't it be fun to incorporate sight-seeing and square dancing for our convention? Hence, the "Fun Badge Tour" was born.

In retrospect, the simplicity with which we approached this event was awesome. 'We were young, naive and had only been square dancing for a couple of years. The concept was simple: We'd hire a couple of buses for a couple of hours and cart convention attendees around San Francisco to various tourist spots. At each spot, we'd get off the bus, dance to a prerecorded tape from a boom box then get back on the bus and go to the next location. For each place that the bus stopped, we'd give the participants a little round "fun badge" for having danced there.

Now here's a little piece of gay square dance history for the records: When we first started square dancing we pirated the previously "straight" concept of fun-dangles and to this day, have brought it to new levels of creativity. We were literally queer for fun dangles! Here in San Francisco, everyone collected them and prided themselves on long strings of fun badges for dancing in odd locations, at odd hours, on holidays and for long durations of time. It became almost competitive. With the advent of badge vendors to the gay square dance scene and good friends like Bert and Rhonda Swerer and Bob and JoAnn Fial, well, the sky was the limit! All you would need to do was to come up with a reason and a design for the badge and you could have it made. I must credit my dear friend James Ozanich with helping to make those contacts and open our eyes to the virtually limitless possibilities for fun badge creativity.

So the stage was set for the very first Fun Badge Tour. We picked the locations, arranged for the buses and started the promotion. The response was incredible; everyone wanted to do it. We kept going back to the bus company to add buses, and we still had waiting lists. Two, then three, then four buses. Two days before the event we were able to charter a fifth bus. It was a no-frills event, bus ride, dancing and badges and as I recall, we charged a whopping $10.00 per person.

On Sunday, August 24, 1986 the very first FBT, the mother of the FBT took off from the New Montgomery Street entrance of the Sheraton Palace Hotel. There was no 8:00 AM call, this tour took off at a civil hour in the afternoon after a lovely brunch in the grand Garden Court of the Sheraton. We had just had a "fashion show" during the brunch in which the men donned square dance dresses and the women wore western attire on loan from one of our vendors. The tone and the mood were set. Garrett Peter (deceased 1992) had worn a bright pink dress in the fashion show and was a host(ess) for one of the buses. It was the first time that he had ever worn a dress, and although not extremely pretty, was very delighted with himself. He announced to me just before the busses were to arrive that he had bought the dress and intended to wear it on the bus.

People in all sorts of costumes started appearing as we queued the crowd for boarding. I remember Nelson Kupperberg of New York arriving in a pristine white sailor-girl suit, complete with hat. Eddie and I frantically assisted with the boarding of the buses, clipboards in hand, checking off names. After what seemed like an eternity, the final bus rolled out on the first great FBT adventure. Neither Eddie nor I went; we were exhausted. We slumped back into the hotel where we sank into easy chairs in the lounge and I bought us both a celebratory drink. Somehow, we had managed to pull the thing off.

Since 1986 the FBT has grown in popularity as a great way to dance and visit a city. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, thank you. Having been somewhat heavily involved in the 1996 San Francisco convention I was a great proponent of the concept to end the FBT "tradition", after all, we started it, we could end it. But we didn't.

Thanks to the terrific efforts of Dwayne Treat, Mark Levine and a host of others, the 1996 San Francisco FBT took place. Unlike 1986, the flavor of the FBT has evolved - t-shirts, drinks and snacks on-board, live callers, permits, insurance, deposits and even a police escort. We had none of that in 1986; we didn't know what we were doing, we just did it.

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