Band Will Have to Start New Tradition

Folk music venues are hard to come by, and Orange County may have lost one of its most vital with the closing of the Anaheim Cultural Arts Center.

The Occasional String Band held twice-monthly events at the center, a traditional “Old Time Dance Party” on the third Saturday of each month and a “Living Tradition” series of folk concerts featuring such performers as Rosalie Sorrels on the second Saturday.

The group continues to sponsor a monthly Cajun dance party in Culver City. But it has not found a new home or homes for the events at the Anaheim center. The band is having trouble finding a location that combines low rent (it paid $60 in Anaheim) with the suspended wooden floor that made the center ideal for dance events.

(Few modern buildings have suspended wooden floors, primarily because of the expense of building them, and many of the older buildings that have the floors are being torn down. Modern floors tend to be laid over cement slabs. “The dancers’ ankles and shins tend to go to hell if they don’t dance on a proper surface,” a band member said.)

The band’s search typifies the problems faced by many of the groups that are scrambling for homes in the wake of the center’s closure. The band has turned up one possible site, a junior high school in Cypress--with a proper dance floor--but the price is high: $332 per use. “We just don’t have that kind of money,” said Carolyn Russell, the main force behind the band’s programs.

Old churches are another possible option. “There are several people out there looking,” Russell said. “We’re going to do something, because there are a lot of people who are profoundly interested in seeing that we continue.” For information on the band’s events, call (714) 638-1466.

The center was “such a beautiful old building,” Russell said. “I went by there a couple of days ago to drop off our last rent check, and it was like a funeral. . . . There are a lot of long faces around there.”