You Can Dance If You Wanna

Ah, Dance Recital Day.  Witness the pageantry, the artistry, the cloud of hairspray and glitter.  A day where a year of sacrificed Tuesday nights culminates in being let off the hook for the summer a grand dance spectacle.  A day where you spend two hours watching other people's kids bump into each other and succumb to stage fright just so you can spend three minutes wrestling with your cell phone camera as you pray your kid does not bump into someone or succumb to stage fright.  A day, in our house at least, marked my hairstyle negotiations and arguments about how and when the performer will get dressed. A day where you can squander all the Father of the Year points you think you earned as a Dance Dad by nodding off in the cool, dark auditorium during the recital.  In short, a day to look forward to every year.

Don't get me wrong, I support my daughter, Grace, and love that she enjoys dancing.  And Grace goes to a great dance school with a wonderful director and teachers.  It is a non-competitive environment with a laid-back recital.  One of the many reasons we selected this studio four years ago was that girls are actually treated like girls.  Unlike some other schools, the routines are not too "mature", the uniforms (outfits? costumes?) are modest and the neither the girls, nor the boys look like they have raided Mommy's make-up bag to do their best Joker impersonations.(Side note: Are male ballet dancers called Ballerinos? If not, they should be.  Yes, the mind does wander during a two hour recital.)  Perhaps most importantly, the director mercifully breaks up her recital into two separate recitals so parents are not subjected to a marathon show in which their child only performs a few minutes.  She also does extra homework to ensure that students, like Grace, who take two different types of classes perform in the same recital.  Of course, sometimes this is not possible.  For our family, this year was our sometime.

That's right, the only thing better than one recital is two recitals in one afternoon! By my count, we were on site for 5 1/2 hours yesterday.  That's a lot of tutus and sequins, a lot of whining and snacks.  Then there's the dancers.  Fortunately or unfortunately, the second leg of our long recital day was anything but boring.  A technical music glitch and then something I have not seen in three previous years kept the audience on their toes (or running for the restroom).  Halfway into Grace's first performance, one of her poor classmates, due to sickness or nerves, lost her lunch up on stage not once, but twice.  Grace and her other classmates, looking confused and horrified, froze mid-pose, uncertain what to do next.  After a few seconds (but what seemed an eternity), someone off stage closed the curtain on the mess.  I was just happy we didn't have a Stand By Me-style pie eating contest chain reaction. ("Lard-Ass, Lard-Ass, Lard-Ass")    I felt so bad for that little girl, but was a tiny bit relieved for the break in the monotony.  Does that make me a horrible person? Please don't answer that question.  I guess I am just happy that it was not Grace projectile vomiting in front of a packed auditorium.  Then I would have had the ethical dilemma of deciding whether to post one of my daughter's finest moments on YouTube.  As it was, after a ten minute delay, the rest of the recital was relatively incident-free (only a couple on-stage stumbles) and we made it out unscathed, if a bit sleepy and hungry.  I think by that time, even I was happy enough to dance.