At a few minutes before 6 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 17, Bunny Blanchard was busy pointing out the different steps to a new dance as half a dozen women behind her mimicked her every move.

As she called out “one, two, three, four,” the dancers behind Blanchard moved to the cadence as one. After a few practice runs, Blanchard, who is the DJ in addition to dance instructor, cues up Brantley Gilbert's “Small Town Throwdown” and the dance begins in earnest.

“Sometimes we'll go to conferences and learn new dances, and I can read the dance steps and understand them, too,” Blanchard said. “A lot of them now come from YouTube. I see a lot of them on the Internet now, and then we go to work.”

The dances are studied and repeated then brought to a group of like-minded line dancing enthusiasts every Monday at Damariscotta's American Legion.

By 6 p.m. there were nearly a dozen dancers trying out dances both new and old in a cleared-out space in the upstairs of the American Legion Hall.

“In the summertime, we usually have a lot more people showing up, but a lot of the snow birds are gone now,” Bonnie Waltz said. “We still have quite a few people show up, though. And they come from all over.”

Waltz said the group is open, and new members come from all over to join the ranks that include dancers from Boothbay, Phippsburg, Jefferson, Southport and Waldoboro. A donation of $5 to cover the cost of the DJ is asked.

The group goes back a few years to Dresden, when a small group began line dancing as a form of fun and exercise, Waltz said. The group split up, however, and half the dancers migrated to Augusta, while the other half settled into Damariscotta, which made a nice half-way point for a lot of the participants, she said.

But no matter where they are coming from, the mission is the same, Waltz said.

“It's a great way to have fun and get some exercise,” she said. “It's been a good way to make friends and meet people from the community, but really it's about coming in and having fun.”

That fun, Waltz said, has no age limit, either. Sometimes line dancers as young as 10 show up, and there are several octogenarians who frequent the dances, as well.

Most Mondays the dancing goes from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., but sometimes two hours isn't enough, and the dancing goes on until 9 p.m., Waltz said.

But this isn't the traditional cowboy boots and honky tonk line dancing group: new dances are plucked from social media and conferences, and country music isn't even a requirement.

“I would say the music is maybe 20 percent country,” Waltz said. “We like to mix it up.”

At one point during the dance Blanchard played a country song, then Kool Skool & The Klass DJs before ending the set with David Civera's “Bye Bye.”

On the weekend of the 22nd, several members of the group will travel to Cape Cod for a meeting of line dancers in Massachusetts. For the event, the dancers are bringing down grass hula skirts and coconut cup tops and hoping to come back with several new dances.

“If I see any dances I like, I'll bring it back up here,” Blanchard said.

The group meets every Monday at the American Legion, 524 Waldoboro Road.

For more information, call Lisa Burnham at 207-592-6674 or Bonnie Waltz at 207-380-5910.