But despite this approach, the club has seen a few serious injuries, including a pair of concussions. One was Kindy Bustos's. "The other one was a girl who was doing a Charleston into a dip with another couple," Donelan recalls. "As her partner dipped her, the other couple kicked, and the girl's very heavy shoe went right into her head.
"Both of them were well-trained, professional dancers who were sober," Donelan says. But that's often not the case. "People will come in after the lesson and see people swinging around. They'll have a couple beers and a couple shots and think, 'Oh, I can do this. Come on, honey, let's get out there.' But they don't know what they're doing; they take up too much room and ruin it for everyone else."
Christine Hauber, another swing instructor, says most of the troubles in local swing clubs can be traced to dancing under the influence. "I do quite a few aerials and I've yet to get hurt, and it's because I do not mix alcohol with dancing. Most of the good swing dancers don't drink at all," she says. "I've seen people who've had too much to drink that throw people into each other and step on you." She says swing injuries have more to do with the youthfulness of the scene than anything else. "With young adults, you still have their rebellious side and their need to go beyond what is safe," she says. "But I think it would be unfair to stop kids from doing aerials, because that's not what causes the problems."
Donelan thinks a maturing swing brigade will remedy its own thrill-seeking behavior. "You get someone twenty-five or thirty years old--they don't think they're indestructible anymore like a seventeen-year-old," he says. "Our scene here is young," notes Crawford, who suffered a concussion, a few broken fingers and a broken tooth while learning her craft in her earlier years. "And as it ages, it's progressing and getting better. Two years ago it was dangerous at the Mercury, but you go there now and it's very safe--very few aerials, and those who are doing aerials are doing them safely."
Victor Ward thinks the swing circuit's risk factors could be eliminated with more safety lessons and a dose of common courtesy. "There is this golden rule that if there's not enough space, you tap somebody on the shoulder and say, 'You've been out here a while dancing. Is it all right if I take this dance with my partner?' But nobody realizes it. But I always tell people in my class: If you really want to dance and you don't want to get stomped on, tap on somebody's shoulder that's been out there the whole night and say, 'Let me in for a second.'"
While it's unlikely that helmets will be de rigueur in the near future, hipsters understand that swing dancing will remain a contact sport for some time. "It all depends on who is on the floor and who you're dancing with, and how many people don't care, and how many drunk people there are," Bustos admits. "But you get this in every crowd; it's not this way with just swing. You just have to deal with it and not let it stop you from dancing."
"I want people to know that you can have a lot of fun doing this," Ward says, "and that there are dangers to it. It's real and a legitimate problem. And if you don't acknowledge it, there are going to be more people out there dancing, and more people are going to get hurt.
