The song circle at the East Bay Fickin' and Piddlin' Potlucks is just such an RUS session--the first time I went, it was in the living room of the house (luckily there are lots of other things going on in other rooms, in the yard, the garage, the basement, etc.), and people were sitting in sofas and overstuffed chairs that might have digested them if they stayed any longer; everyone but I had RUS in hand, one old geezer (even older than I) was playing the guitar (sitting in a straight backed chair). I came up from two hours of the bluegrass circle in the basement and played a bit of harmonica along with it--not too loud, mind you: I didn't want to drown out the twenty voices in the circle. Someone picks song, tells page number, several minutes of people trying to find the page and then the song on the page, the guitar player strums a chord and the mumbling begins. I took it for a half hour or so then went looking for blues players. The next one I went to was dominated by a single singer--there were ten or twelve people in the circle but this one woman chose half the songs and a friend of hers chose the other half, for the first one to sing, all of course from RUS. The woman could sing, at least. After an hour of this, people started dropping out and the few who were left started singing without the books and it got pretty good for the half hour before cleanup time.--seed