User talk:Dleep2
Welcome back! I see you are having another go at seeing the grandparents get their due. I met Nina, and she was the bee's knees. Of course there should be no doubt of their status, but WP has its strange ways... I've recently put up a page on Lyndon Wainwright, which you might like to glance at. I had good luck there: I found he was alive and pretty well for an 89-year old. He gave me plenty of stuff for the article. He's written a mini-autobiog for his great-grandchildren; pity Dimitri didn't do one... Macdonald-ross (talk) 22:18, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
Dimitri & Nina[edit]
Well, thank you so much for your reply. I hoped you would! About six months ago I noticed how badly ballroom dancing in general was being treated on WP, and decided to do something about it. I had been taught dancing by someone who had taken tuition in the latin dances from Pierre & Lavelle, so I knew their names from being a teenager in the 1950s. I wish now I had taken the trouble to meet them, but I didn't. Since I'm something of an expert on Cuban music I decided to start with the group of dancers who started LA dancing in England, from where it has spread all over the world.
I soon discovered the lack of reliable reference sources was the main problem. I kept seeing references to Pierre, but it was ages before I had enough to put up the page on WP. I still don't have enough for Lavelle. With difficult cases I start a Word file offline. Anything on WP gets copied by bots and plagiarised widely. Even these personal pages.
I've got copies of all the books written about LA dances at that time, including both Dimitri's books and Pierre's book. I don't know where you are, of course, but if you are somewhere in England, we might arrange to meet, and you could have a look at the books. It sounds as though you don't have a copy of his first book.
I've tried to interview all the survivors from that time. So far, I've only found two. I'd certainly like to meet your father if he was willing. He's bound to have lots of things tucked away at the back of his mind which might help us. And I'll answer more fully about myself, but not on WP (for reason given above)
Regards, Macdonald-ross (talk) 12:27, 24 September 2009 (UTC)