Ice cream social provides relief from heat

By Elisa Glushefski

Published: July 20, 2008

During every song the Kena Temple Shrine Band played, Ed Roman had one of his feet either shaking or tapping to the beat.

“They’re all favorites,” Roman said of the band’s song lineup.

Roman lounged in a folding chair next to his wife, Mitzi Roman, at the Loy E. Harris Pavilion in Old Town Manassas on Sunday afternoon.

“Lots of lively music,” Mitzi said.

The Woodbridge husband and wife were among more than 50 people who gathered at the pavilion to listen, and for one couple, dance, to some numbers from the swing era.

“We have no shame,” Cheryl Smith, 56, said of she and her husband’s dancing.

The Smiths of Annandale were in town taking care of some chores at a town house they own in Manassas, saw what was going on and decided to stop in.

The two admitted they were a bit rusty, but said they saw it as a good opportunity to brush up on the dance moves they learned in ballroom and swing classes.

After a roughly 90-minute performance, the crowd was treated to one of the great summertime traditions: an ice cream social.

Before band members could even pack their instruments away, a line had already formed behind three tables underneath the pavilion.

Then the tubs of ice cream were brought out and the people were given what they had been waiting for.

“It makes it all worth the while,” Alan Schrager, 52, said of waiting through the concert in the near unbearable heat for his free bowl of ice cream. “It’s nice and cold for a hot summer day.”