Annie Coleman came out as a square-dance caller last August, when she threw a hoedown for her 29th birthday. Before that, few of her guests knew she’d been calling dances since she was 14, and she was a little worried about what they might think of an activity often associated with eighth-grade gym and frilly petticoats. “I really didn’t think I would get a good response,” she says, “but everyone loved it. We danced from eight at night till three in the morning.”
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Coleman, who works in the financial industry, learned to call at her family’s Wisconsin resort, the Golden Horse Ranch. Opened by her grandparents in the 1940s, the ranch (now closed) held weekly barn dances with Coleman’s grandfather as caller. That, she says, is also where she learned that dancing “breaks down boundaries when you meet new people. It gives people an out to totally let down their guard.”
The event, held in January, was a hit. The band thought at most 30 people would dance, but instead Coleman wound up leading a crowd of almost 100 for four hours in dances like the Texas Star, Swing Your Ma, and the Virginia Reel. At the end of the evening, as she led the group in a circle dance–in which dancers hold hands to form a ring and skip sideways, forward, or backward as the caller directs–a bandmate dubbed her the B.F. Skinner of barn dancing.
