As dawn breaks, the Ladies of the Rolling Pin keep alive a tradition last year.

Photo courtesy of the Ladies of the Rolling Pin

NARRAGANSETT — Dawn will break at 5:42 a.m. tomorrow to the sound of a dozen cracking rolling pins when the border Morris dance team, The Ladies of the Rolling Pin, welcome in spring with a seaside jig — and maybe a hunk of quiche.

It’s a tradition born three years back, in response to a casual query from a heavily scheduled out-of-state Morris dancer.

“ ‘Do you have plans for May Day?’ ” Donna Mirza of Wakefield recalls being asked.

“We don’t, but I think we should,” she remembers responding as the dawn dance, well, dawned on her.

Within days, Mirza asked the other team members if they would rise up in the cold darkness, drive to the beach by The Towers in Narragansett, and dance by the light of the emerging sun.

“ ‘Why not?’ ” Mirza, 49, says they said.

But why for?

“It’s a way to inspire people,” Mirza responds, half serious, half not, which is something of the team’s general philosophy.

“We’re kind of a spoof on Morris dancers,” said Marjory Stevens, 50, of Wakefield, a teacher at Toll Gate High School in Warwick. “We take the domestic idea that we could be home baking but instead we’re taking it to the streets.

“We’re a spoof on ourselves, too.”

SPOOF OR SOUFFLÉ, they’re planning to splash cake flour on their faces tomorrow, pull on black skirts and white aprons, and gather beachside by Narragansett’s Towers to hoof and holler and have some fun.

“I needed exercise, and Ladies is much more fun than working out,” said Betty Merner of Charlestown.

“We are as much fun as we look,” says Jeanne Behie of Wakefield, adding that the decade-old group “recruits people by telling them that if they ever wanted to dance in the streets of Wakefield,” this is a way to learn how.

Jacqui Kikuchi of West Warwick will wake her daughter Denali, 14, at 4:15 a.m. to make tomorrow’s drive. Jacqui dances and Denali plays the fiddle.

“It is a great mother-daughter activity,” Kikuchi reasons. “One night each week we go to practice together, and we go to the performances together.”

Tomorrow, they’ll bring their enthusiasm, and maybe a few chocolate doughnuts, to the beach, and hope others will participate in what is essentially not so very different from generations of May Day revelers.

THIS FIRST DAY of the fifth month is celebrated worldwide with Maypoles and public dancing, traditions that reach back to the Middle Ages, when English and Scottish men blackened their faces with coal and danced in village streets clacking sticks and panhandling for money.

Border Morris dance teams have been around for centuries, vigorously stepping to the sound of live music, and the jingle of their own bells, or to the music of volunteer musicians such as Barrington fiddler Michelle Kaminsky and her husband, accordion player Alan Bradbury.

“It is a tradition in England to do this kind of dancing at dawn on May Day, and it is one that feels right to do here as well,” she said. She added it is also her way to support live music, hoping it won’t be “lost to us as technology becomes bigger and bigger in our lives.”

The local dance team practices weekly, travels to festivals and competitions and public performances such as Providence’s WaterFire. Three years ago, the ladies performed in England at a nine-day festival where Mirza said they were treated like starlets.

“Are you the Ladies of the Rolling Pin of the U.S.?” she recalled being asked, feeling like a middle-aged American Idol.

Their dancing friends in England will come here this summer, Mirza said, for a week of touring and hoofing, the Rolling Pin ladies as their guides.

TOMORROW, THE women will gather at a quarter till dawn, chug some coffee and then clack those rolling pins. The first year of this emerging tradition brought a few family members, and a couple of dogs, to witness the oceanfront heraldry. But the small audience didn’t diminish their spirits. They danced last year to a slightly larger crowd, and are hoping for even larger numbers tomorrow.

Among those who will be driving the farthest to shake hands with the sun will be Karen McGrath of Foster, who didn’t give up on this group after she was injured during a warm-up for her very first performance. She just reinvented herself.

“I modified my drummer nephew’s second-best high-hat cymbal stand to accept a set of Wilton professional wedding cake pans.” She set a bride and groom on top, added a Cajun triangle and a washboard with a cowbell to her instruments, and joined the musicians’ pit, providing music to swing to.

For Mirza, swinging to the music is the best part.

When she’s not dancing, she’s biking or skiing or teaching movement at the Meadowbrook Waldorf School, Richmond. She’s been Morris dancing for almost 10 years now with the Rolling Pin ladies, and hopes to share the joy tomorrow with area residents.

“No message,” she said of their early morning ode to spring. “Oh, gosh no. Just rise a little earlier and come down to enjoy a sunrise.”

Afterward, they’ll climb back into their cars and their everyday lives as teachers, psychologists, dental assistants, and students, such as Denali. An eighth-grader at the Meadowbrook Waldorf School, she said being a group member “has been a great experience, and I hope to continue performing until I’m old like everyone else on the team.”

afleming@projo.com