HUNDREDS CONVERGE ON NKY FOR CINCINNATI BOP CLUB'S MOVE ACROSS THE RIVER 2007

Contact: Paul Hennessey
(513) 728-0855 (m)

HUNDREDS CONVERGE ON NKY FOR CINCINNATI BOP CLUB'S MOVE ACROSS THE RIVER 2007

Fort Mitchell, KY/October 26, 2007—It's called the Grand Finale of the Party Season when the Cincinnati Bop Club's four-day dance party invades the Drawbridge Hotel in Fort Mitchell November 7-10.

Up to 1,000 dancers from all over the country are expected for the event according to event organizer Paul Hennessey of Loveland, who not only serves as President of the Cincinnati club but is also Vice President of the American Bop Association.

"Bop dancing has been getting much more popular the past five years," says Hennessey, along with wife Susan Ward Hennessey teach instructional classes the first three Tuesday evenings of the month, January to October. "We've noticed at least a 50 percent increase in people taking lessons the past ten years. It's something people in their fifties and older tell us, ‘It's something I've always wanted to do, and this is the year I'm going to do it.' "

The dancing has different names in different parts of the country. For instance in Chicago, it's called jitterbug. In St. Louis, swing or shag in South Carolina. "All the dances have variations but the footwork and count are the same," said Hennessey. He describes it as "triple step, triple step, rock step."

Gary Chaney of St. Louis is President of the American Bop Association says bop is only original form of American Dance. "It was founded in the early 1900s by African Americans attempting to express the freedoms they were enjoying at the time and spread to other races. Other types of dance such as the Twist have become popular and faded. But Bop has endured and proven it's not a fad. It's extremely popular internationally with the spread of its influence during World War II where U.S. servicemen introduced it to the Europeans."

The Hennesseys are the only Greater Cincinnatians out of 39 in the American Bop Association Hall of Fame. The Cincinnati event has the honor of inducting five new members or two couples in the latest class—Jim and Georgia Watson of Columbus, Bill and Gingy (gin-gee) Wallace of Louisville and Barbara Cooley from Memphis.

Paul Hennessey has been bop dancing since he was 15, Susan since she was a teenager growing up along the "Jersey Shore. She and Paul became a team and attended for the first time in 1990 a national competition in Myrtle Beach, SC. This trip served as the impetus for the Hennessey's starting the local Bop club.

Admission for the entire event is $50 or $25 per day. For more information, call 513-697-6362.

The mission of the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitors Bureau is that of an aggressive sales, marketing, service and informational organization whose primary responsibility is to positively impact the Northern Kentucky economy through conventions, meetings and visitor expenditures. The direct economic impact of visitors' spending in Campbell, Kenton and Boone Counties in 2006 was $263 million.