I love jamming. I love getting together socially and breaking out the instruments. I love to sing. I love playing at nursing and retirement homes. I no longer even attend house parties that don't involve home-made music. However, I am tired of playing for dances, specifically contradances.

It's nice to see people having a good time and all that, and it's nice making a production of our sound seeing how good we can make it but it's begun feeling like a lot of work. While everyone else is out there playing, *we're* working.

Our core group of 5 (and now 6) played for contradances for 6 solid years. We learned a lot of tunes and we play very well together. Our energy was high, we had fun, and we got a lot of strokes. Then some of us got busy and we stopped.

My problem is that after we stopped the scheduled dances five years ago, we still often get asked to play a 'special' dance, or they don't have a band for that week, or it's a holiday dance and they would like to have us... And I just don't want to do it anymore. Right now, they're asking us to do a dance on September 21 and another on Thanksgiving Day weekend. I was out of town when they did the July 4th dance; the one before that was in May. Last year it was at least as frequent.

How do you say NO? The rest of the band is gungho again. I'm the oldest of us at 66- the youngest is 41- but most of them are close to my age so I don't think it's just simple age. Maybe I've just gotten lazy? Has anyone else come to that stage? Did you eventually get past it?

Our 'band' consists of a fiddle, a banjo, two mandos, an upright bass and one guitar, me. If I stop, they'll have to get another guitar player. I don't want to stop jamming and practicing with them- we meet once a week just for fun.

BTW, we're not talking a lot of money here. Most of the money we made over the years gets put into sound systems and other supplies.

Any thoughts?