Lynne and Victor Rosansky of Antrim met more than 50 years ago when Lynne was looking for her fugitive cat. They both lived in the same three-story building in Cambridge, Mass. Lynne was studying anthropology and Victor studying economics, and Victor was enlisted to help track down the cat. While locating that cat, they discovered they both had dogs and began to go on frequent walks together.
Today they have been married for 44 years and have three children and seven grandchildren. Lynne sits on the Antrim Planning Board and Victor is on the board of directors of the Antrim Historical Society. The couple was also recently crowned the grand prize winners at the New Hampshire Big Band Dance Contest at the Jaffrey Park Theatre on Aug. 29.
Lynne and Victor said they don’t regularly dance in competitions, but love to go out dancing and to experience live music. At the contest in August, they made it a point to dance with members of the audience – who might be shy or not have a partner – to try to fill the dance floor and help everyone feel included.
They attribute their success at this event to knowing how to dance the polka, while many of the other dancers bowed out when they heard the band strike up the polka’s tempo. Victor said that growing up in Brooklyn for 21 years steeped him in a variety of dance styles and cultures.
“My sister, who’s three years older than I am, taught me the Mashed Potatoes; she taught me the Bristol Stomp, every dance you could think of, because she was a teenage dancer,” said Victor. “And she wore bobby socks like someone out of a movie,” he added. “But I learned the polka, because when you’re in Brooklyn, you polka.”
Nowadays they try to limit their polka-exertion a bit: “We’re not young anymore,” said Lynne,” so when it gets to the point of kicking, we’re not gonna kick.”
“Dancing has always been something we just loved to do,” said Lynne.
Victor said, “Lynne is adverse to structure,” and so eschewed dance lessons, but Lynne said Victor “knew how to dance and basically taught me without teaching me so I didn’t have to feel self-conscious” about the structure of a formal dance lesson. Now, the two love to improvise steps together and just have a good time: “We always get compliments,” said Victor, “because we’re very loose and bounce around a lot, and when you’re doing swing and old rock and roll” that kind of laissez-faire spirit goes a long way.
But it’s not all about extemporizing: “There are steps that I’ve learned over the years watching good dancers,” said Victor. For instance, “spins.” “If you hold your hand up and the woman is spinning, if you keep it up, she’ll keep spinning.” “People don’t know that,” he laughed. He also offered this hint: “when you dance, smile, because it relaxes your partner, and people watching you feel good because you’re smiling. It looks like you’re enjoying yourself.”
And it looks like they are enjoying themselves because they are enjoying themselves, said Lynne. “I just love the music, the 40s swing music, the rhythms, the old Benny Goodman,” she said. “It kind of gets into your bones and you feel it.” Lynne added that she is also particularly partial to Glenn Miller, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith and 50s rock and roll.
In 1989 the couple bought the Uplands Inn in Antrim and opened a bed and breakfast. They said the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to move away from operating the business but they are thinking of making it available for weddings soon. The old farmhouse, built in 1845, is surrounded by rolling hills and lilacs, pear trees, apple trees, a sunflower and vegetable garden, and perennials planted so that sections of the garden are in bloom throughout the summer.
From the start, the house was imbued with music and musicians. Lynne worked as a professor at Wellesley College and the couple’s first innkeeper was her MBA student and a piano player. Victor has been playing musical instruments since he was 5 years old. “I’ve played in folk bands, I’ve played in jazz bands,” he said, and Lynne has played the piano for almost as long.
Their house has a music room where a big standup bass stands next to an upright piano. They say blues and swing musicians – even Grammy-winning pianist “Pinetop” Perkins, who played with such blues legends as Bessie Smith – would stay at the Inn and play the instruments they kept in the music room when they had gigs at the nearby Rynborn Blues Club in downtown Antrim.
“I think we did a lot of just sort of hanging out at the Rynborn dancing,” said Lynne. “We miss the Rynborn, everybody misses the Rynborn,” she said. The restaurant and blues club moved to Keene in 2003 and has since closed.
The Rynborn had “a really wonderful southern cuisine – like blackened catfish, and homemade dinner rolls, and wooden nickels,” said Lynne. “And they also had a guy who booked blues musicians from all over the country – people from Chicago, people who had played with Muddy Waters,” she said.
The two said they mourn the closure of the Rynborn, and the toll the pandemic took on live music, but stressed there is still an active local music scene in Antrim. One of Victor’s bands, the Rickety Crickets, tries to play at local open mics monthly. “No, you don’t really,” laughed Lynne. “Well, we started to,” Victor conceded. “Aspirationally, they play monthly,” said Lynne. A band member recently hurt his shoulder, they explained. “They’re called the Rickety Crickets,” she said, “and, because they’re rickety, things sometimes don’t work, so you have to take a break from playing.”