Happy 15th birthday DC Flamenco!

Flamenco guitarist Miguelito at Las Tapas. December 28, 2010 (photo by Steve Johnson)

It's noon on a Monday as I type these words. Not just any Monday though: 15 years ago on January 10th 1996, I launched the DC Flamenco website! There's no big party planned like I did for the 10th birthday five years ago. Not to worry. I'll do a big party for the 20th for sure!

I'm not going to go into how much the DC Flamenco website has done to raise awareness of the local flamenco scene. After 15 years pretty much everyone by now already knows that!

Instead, indulge me as I reminisce about how first I came up with the idea way back then.

Flamenco dancer Sara Jerez and Miguelito. December 28, 2010 (photo by Steve Johnson)

In early January 1996 the DC area was hit with a major blizzard (well, "major" at least by Washingtonian standards). I was living in Pentagon City at the time and I had day job in addition to my flamenco gigs. But thanks to the record breaking snow accumulation, the office was closed for a week and I was basically stuck in my apartment with my guitar and a 75 MHz Pentium computer with 14K dial-up Internet access. Don't laugh...that was the latest in consumer level computers at the time!

Believe it or not, I wasn't really that interested in the Internet back then. But after a day or two being snowed-in at home one has to find ways of passing the time to keep from going crazy! So day after day I logged on to my AOL account (at $2.99 an hour!) in search of something interesting to keep me entertained. And eventually I stumbled upon AOL's service called Personal Publisher where you fill out a form with basic personal info, upload a pic and add a paragraph or two about yourself, click a button and it magically creates a one-page personal webpage for you. Yeah I know big f'ing deal, right? But remember this was 1996 and the World Wide Web was relatively new.

Sara and Miguelito. December 28, 2010 (photo by Steve Johnson)

So the first time I published my personal page on AOL in 1996, this is what I listed:

• Thursday nights at Habana Village in Adams Morgan with dancer Sara Candela
• Friday nights at Casablanca in Old Town Alexandria with dancer Sara Candela
• Friday nights at Las Tapas with guitarist Paco de Málaga and dancer Ana Martínez
• Guitarist Torcuato Zamora at El Bodegón several nights a week

Plus I announced the many flamenco dance classes where I was the guitarist:

• George Washington University for the Spanish Dance Society
• Danza del Río with Joana del Río
• Joy of Motion with Ziva
• Viva Flamenco with Ena Camargo
• Brookland Studios with Jaime Coronado
• Carlos Rosario Adult School with Joana del Río

Playing just about every night, yeah I was quite busy as a guitarist even back then too!

Sara. December 28, 2010 (photo by Steve Johnson)

But having a personal webpage that noone knows about is useless. You need to submit it to search engines. Well back in 1996, the top ones that I knew of were Yahoo! and Webcrawler. My submission to Webcrawler was listed almost instantaneously and I think Yahoo! took a few days to get me in their index. So a few days after creating my first webpage, it was official, on January 10, 1996 I was searchable on the Web and DC Flamenco was born!

Eventually I grew out of AOL's Personal Publisher and did it the harder but more powerful way: I created webpages from scratch. Since I couldn't afford Microsoft FrontPage, I had to do all the HTML coding by hand.

As for the name "DC Flamenco" that was a no-brainer. And yeah it did occur to me to call it "Flamenco DC" but I was thinking that alphabetically "DC Flamenco" would appear first in the search engine listings. But what did I know? The Web was new to me and I didn't know any better.

So for a few years I used the "DC Flamenco" name as a logo on my webpage but I didn't actually register the DCFLamenco.com domain until 2000.

Sara and Miguelito. December 28, 2010 (photo by Steve Johnson)

As DC Flamenco grew in popularity, I decided to add a listing of flamenco teachers. This actually proved to be quite difficult in the beginning. A lot of the local teachers were concerned about my publishing their name and phone number and email address (if they actually had one). Years later, things are much different now: teachers approach me to be listed instead of the other way around.

Sara and Miguelito. December 28, 2010 (photo by Steve Johnson)

For the first couple of years, my website was just a bunch of listings: shows, teachers, links and a list of place to buy flamenco stuff. One of the most common queries I'd get via email was, "Miguelito, where can I buy flamenco shoes?" hence the creation of a "Where to Buy Flamenco Stuff" page.

So why is it that a guitarist like me created a flamenco website? Because like it or not, us flamenco guitarists tend to get around. You see...when you think about it, there are typically so many more flamenco dancers than there are flamenco guitarists. So the few competent flamenco guitarists you find in a metropolitan area like DC tend to play for several or sometimes all of the local dance companies and schools. That's how it was back then. Back in 1996 I was playing for Spanish Dance Society, Danza del Río, Viva Flamenco, Ana Martinez Flamenco Dance Company, Sol y Sombra and Ziva's Spanish Dance Ensemble.

Since I was playing for everyone, I knew what everyone was working on, what shows were coming up and all the gossip too. Just kidding...sort of. And since noone else had a flamenco website at the time, it was up to me to get the word out via DC Flamenco.

Sara and Miguelito. December 28, 2010 (photo by Steve Johnson)

At first I added pics the hard way. I bought a single-use camera, took pics, got them developed at a one-hour photo processor, took them to Kinko's and had them scanned and saved on a floppy disk. I didn't realize what a pain-in-the-butt this process was until I got my first digital camera in 2000 which I didn't pay for. A fellow guitarist friend Ramin Rad and dance student Soheila Nassiri worked together to get the local flamenco community to chip-in $500 to buy me a digital camera. It was a 2.3 megapixel Olympus. Don't laugh...it was pretty good camera at the time. Thanks again Ramin and Soheila!

——————————

The DC Flamenco website has been around long enough that people might sometimes take it for granted. And that's OK. Let me explain why.

I can still remember when I first arrived in DC in 1991. I wanted to find out where the flamenco scene was and the Web as we know it didn't exist yet. So I called the Spanish Embassy and they told me about the flamenco dance classes at George Washington University. Eventually I got around to meeting all the local flamencos but I made my way through the community by word of mouth. I enjoyed the process but it was very inefficient compared to today.

Nowadays things are much different. On DC Flamenco, I pretty much list everything that goes on, who's teaching where, who's performing where and I publish so many photos of local events that people who have never been to DC already are familiar with the names and faces of many of the local artists. Thing is that in 1991, it was hard to find out about the flamenco scene, but today there's no excuse in knowing where to find the flamenco in DC.

People may not always acknowledge my website, but after 15 years of getting the word out, I'm pretty confident that my work on DC Flamenco has done so much to raise the awareness of the flamenco scene here in the nation's capital.

I love it when I meet people at my shows and when they tell me about the DC Flamenco website and I tell them to their surprise that I am the webmaster, they say, "Really? That's you?"

"Yes, that's me and yes you're welcome!"

PS It's no accident that today's birthday blog includes photos of dancer Sara Jerez. As it turns out, I first met Sara in a dance class the same year DC Flamenco was born!