“You actually want shoes with less traction,” teacher Georgina Oram explained, surveying the proffered footwear choices.
Western-adjacent heels vied with more sensible naugahyde and rubber snow boots. Outside, the temperature hovered around zero degrees, and snow blanketed the ski mountain. The surprise was not the weather. It was the authority figure recommending heels.
Oram, 36, wore her standard teaching outfit: cowboy boots, denim shorts, and a cardigan. She leaned against the long wood-and-marble counter at Fellow Mountain Cafe on Main Street in Hunter, where trays of cinnamon rolls and focaccia sat within reach. She had just arrived from her home in Catskill to do something few coffee shops have witnessed: call a country line dance class during a Mexican cantina-themed après-ski
On Saturday, Oram brought queer country line dancing to Hunter, transforming the après-ski crowd into a full-fledged dance floor, part of a growing movement that blends country tradition with contemporary LGBTQ+ community.
Country line dancing traces threads through waltzes, polkas, disco and Billy Ray Cyrus’s 1992 hit “Achy Breaky Heart.” (This video of the latter is a tour de force of 1990’s country-pop hair, jeans, two-step twirls, and a cool floral bustier). But Oram came to line dancing through the much more recent avenue of social media, perhaps once again proving the endless mutability of the box-step pattern dance form.
“I saw on Instagram, and in the news, that queer line dancing was hopping. I would see videos of friends in L.A. and I knew some people dancing in the city,” she said a few hours later, after rounds of “Copperhead Road,” and “Honky Tonk Highway.”
Her first experience came more than three years ago. “Stud Country was doing a party at Lincoln Center for Pride. There were probably about 500 people there, all across Lincoln Square, and they had a huge disco ball the size of the fountain. I went and was hooked.”
Many hours of dancing followed, along with a full-time move to Catskill. Oram became a regular at first Thursday Queer Line Dancing nights at Unicorn Bar in Kingston.
“Socially sometimes it feels like you just go to a bar and have a drink and hang out – it was nice to have people together, meeting each other, but dancing,” she said.
Last year, looking for a similar scene closer to home, she couldn’t find one. A mentor offered blunt advice: “just start teaching.”
She did. Under the name Catskill Line, Oram taught her first class at a local hot yoga studio in November.
Back at Fellow, she cued up Role Model’s “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out” for the dancers, skiers, children and unsuspecting michelada-seekers gathered on the wood floor. Soon, the windows fogged. Boots stomped. It was hard to tell who was learning to grapevine and who had simply stopped in for soup.
JD Eiseman, the cafe’s general manager since its opening in 2020, says he’s proud to maintain Fellow as “a place that feels of the community and for the community.” His colleague Jade Sinskul invoked the idea of a “third space”—sociology’s concept for the non-home, non-work places where we meet our neighbor. Days later Eiseman showed a photo of the 1913 building in its former life as an Odd Fellows Hall, before the hospitality group behind Scribner’s Catskill Lodge lifted it above the flood plain and added a porch.
No one could say whether dances filled the hall a century ago, but either way, Saturday felt like a beginning.
Lex Sottile is a contributing writer. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.